Find Some Serenity on Your Mac

As much as I love working in a home-office setup, there's one thing I sorely miss: a little quiet corner to retreat to for a quick break from work. Who would have thought that I would find this in the form of a screen saver called Serene Saver 2 HD?

When Serene Saver 2 HD kicks in to "save your computer's screen," it runs gorgeous nature scene movies, including sunsets and beach scenes, moving clouds, a Lotus flower in the rain, a view of Scottish farm pastures, and more. All of these scenes have their own ambient audio tracks, so you can hear the waves breaking on the beach, the rustling of tree leaves, bird song, etc.

Imagine this being animated!
(Click on the image to see it at full resolution.)

The magic behind Serene Saver 2 HD are looped, seemingly endless QuickTime movies, which, thanks to a native resolution of up to 1280x720 pixels, look pretty spectacular even on larger monitors. Serene Saver 2 HD being shareware, its installer includes just one scene movie, so before you can enjoy some warm-n-fuzzy serenity on your Mac you need to download more scenes. To be precise, you need to download all available scenes: there is no preview of what's available, and you cannot select individual scenes for download.

Get on the scene

Therefore, with the scene movies' sizes averaging about 25MBs, the download may take quite a while, especially if you have a slower Internet connection. Once the download has finished, though, you are rewarded with the sheer beauty of what you see on your Mac's screen.

You can either choose a single scene for display, or have Serene Saver 2 HD cycle through a number of selected scenes. By assigning a rating to each scene, those with a higher rating will show up in the cycle more often. Want to preview a scene before you select it? Just double-click it in the list to make it play on the desktop. Yup, that's right: Serene Saver 2 HD can also play any scene right there on your Mac's Desktop, although I do find that a bit too distracting (even though it is distracting in a pleasant way).

Although Serene Saver 2 HD's preferences only display a simple, non-hierarchical list of scenes for now, the actual movies are stored on the hard drive in sub-folders like "Fun," "Nature > Plants," "Nature > Trees," etc., so I wonder what plans the developers have for the scene selection list in the future. Will the scenes be sorted thematically? Will there be a theme filter for the list? That would be useful, especially if the good folks behind Serene Saver 2 HD will continue adding (hopefully many) new scenes in the future.

Let's take a break

Serene Saver 2 HD does not only serve as a screen saver or desktop movie theater, it also gently nags you to take regular relaxation breaks from your work through its "Automatic Serenity" feature: when activated, the screen saver will kick in at certain intervals or at specific times to tell you that it's time to wind down for a while. But before it does, you'll see a dialog box that lets you set a few options for that break, or bail out completely. Once the "Serenity Period" is over, the scene fades out and you can get back to work.

Serene Saver 2 HD still has a few minor glitches, e.g., it requires administrator access to download new scenes and the Automatic Serenity mode only works if desktop scene display has been enabled. But I am not aware of any other screen saver -- or rather: any other software in general -- that makes me take a deep relaxing breath and lets me recharge my batteries for a short precious break from the daily computer grind every time I see it, as this little gem does.

If you feel like your office setup may also benefit from a "digital quiet corner," do give Serene Saver 2 HD a try: a 10-day trial version can be downloaded from the developer's Web site. The registration fee is $29.95 for a single-machine and $49.95 for a five-machine license, and, currently, its library includes a total of forty scenes, with, for the time being, new scenes being made available for free.