Ever since I switched to Macs, I’ve been using the gorgeous Flurry screen saver (yes, even before it was built into the OS with the release of 10.2), and been happy with it. I had my energy settings set to put the computer to sleep a mere 5 minutes after the screen saver activated, so I didn’t see it or think about it much. When I did catch it, though, it had the ability, as all good screen savers do, to short circuit my brain and leave me staring at it and drooling.
A little while back, however, I stumbled across this list of the top ten Mac OS X screen savers. Electric sheep isn’t even listed in the top ten—it’s an honorable mention—though it should be. It’s stunning, mesmerizing and addictive, and also has the coolest title of any screen saver I’ve ever seen. What makes it truly special, though, is that it requires an internet connection; the abstract animations are generated collectively by all the computers with electric sheep installed.
Enough talk; you really have to see it to believe it, so go get it already. It’s available, by the way, for Linux and Windows as well.
Usually I think of Twitter kind of like this, but this parasite-app is pretty interesting. Heh. (Via Gruber)
Ever wanted to see your website as a graph, broken down by the HTML DOM? Now you can, at this site. Here’s the graph for my blog:
The legend:
blue: for links (the A tag)
red: for tables (TABLE, TR and TD tags)
green: for the DIV tag
violet: for images (the IMG tag)
yellow: for forms (FORM, INPUT, TEXTAREA, SELECT and OPTION tags)
orange: for linebreaks and blockquotes (BR, P, and BLOCKQUOTE tags)
black: the HTML tag, the root node
gray: all other tags
Pretty cool. (Via Drawn!)
Phill Ryu, the mind behind the recent fake Leopard screenshot contest, has started a new, American Idol-style contest called My Dream App, where contestants, assisted by a team of the best developers, designers, journalists and technophiles in the business—including Apple founder Steve Wozniak—vie to present the best Mac application idea to a panel of developer judges. Winners get their application idea implemented, prizes and royalties to the finished product:
You’re about to be involved in a revolution in the software industry: a no holds barred, totally transparent and ridiculously low barrier version of Macintosh shareware development. Ever wished you had the programming chops to create a killer app? For the first time, you’re going to have a chance to make those dream apps come true.
By entering the contest, your idea will be competing for a slot in the initial round of the 24 best, decided by our three developer judges, Austin Sarner (AppZapper), Jason Harris (ShapeShifter), and Martin Ott (SubEthaEdit). Each of these talented Mac developers will be weeding the coolest ideas out of the bunch, focusing on innovation, marketability, and feasibility of development. Then comes the fun part. These 24 entrants will, over the next five weeks, compete, blog, and further develop their ideas. The catch? The rest of the users on the site will be voting to determine who stays in.
We have high-profile Macintosh developers, well-known tech journalists, popular bloggers, and the best UI designers in the industry lined up to give feedback and help develop your ideas over the five weeks of voting. People like Kevin Rose (Digg), original Mac evangelist Guy Kawasaki, New York Times columnist and best-selling author David Pogue, and even Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. But of course, by the end of it, only three ideas will remain.
This is the best part. Not only will each of the winners receive a prize (ranging from iPod Shuffles to Mac Books), but under development manager John Casasanta’s watch, their ideas will be made into full shareware applications by each of the developer judges and published under My Dream App, with royalties reserved for each winner.
(Via Slashdot)
Here’s a nice retrospective of the evolution of GUIs from 1984 to the present. (Via Slashdot)
A couple of guys somewhere did a lego rendering of MC Escher’s drawing Relativity. Brilliant! Some construction details can be found here. (Via Scarlett’s Letter)
Day 6. It’ll be back online tomorrow. Woo!
