Make your Screen Saver Informative

I'm not normally the type who gets excited over a new screen saver, but last week's release of Status Screen Saver by Logan Rockmore really grabbed my attention. Both for its clever implementation and usefulness in an automated home or office.

Status Screen Saver, as the name implies, notifies you of changes in your Mac's applications while your screen saver is running. But notice that I wrote "your screen saver" in the previous sentence—this is the first of Rockmore's clever tricks. Status Screen Saver lets you continue to use your favorite screen saver because the status displays are added to the bottom portion of the screen area, similar to how Dashboard displays its widget bar. I'm thrilled about this, because it allows me to keep using Pyrotheque, the entrancing fireworks screen saver from Toasty Code.

Status Screen Saver comes with several built-in modules that let you display useful information like the number of unread messages and Twitter "tweets" that you have waiting, battery charging status, your computer's uptime, NetNewsWire status, and more. And if these aren't enough for you, Rockmore has built a very simple, yet flexible, method for creating your own status displays. As soon as I learned about this, I was sure that Status Screen Saver was about to become a very useful tool for my automated home.

To create your own status module, you write an AppleScript that returns a string value (for display in the screen saver), provide an icon, and set a couple of behavior parameters. It really couldn't be simpler, and in short amount of time I created status modules that display the number of incoming telephone calls I missed while out of the office, and the caller ID of the last incoming phone call. This information is already tracked by my home automation system, so it was simply a matter of writing an AppleScript to get the values and pass them back to the screen saver.

If you ever find yourself exiting your screen saver just so you can check the status of something or other on your Mac, Status Screen Saver might be just the thing you're looking for. It's for Leopard-only and freeware (donations accepted), so give it a whirl and see how you like it. There's a few more modules I'd like to create, but I'm interested in what you do with it, too. Feel free to leave a comment and let the rest of us know.