Animated Desktops

Hey MF users!

A while ago a friend came over with his mac laptop and had an awsome (realistic) aquarium background which was completely animated.

The best bit about it... it was FREEWARE

Since then he has uninstalled it and cant remember what it was called, and i cant find any freeware animated desktops that look any good!

Any one got any links to some cool sites with them on?

Cheers everyone!

~~ TS ~~

The aquarium was probably the snappily titled Something Fishy: 3D Desktop Aquarium Screensaver. Not strictly freeware (the paid version allows more...erm...fish), but pretty close.

Thing is though, the version I'm talking about is an actual DESKTOP.

You could still use your mac as normal but your desktop was animated

Cheers anyway sshrago!

~~ TS ~~

try googling it

Hey Christm!

I spent a couple of hours googling it yesterday but couldn't find the sort of thing i am looking for. They were either Shareware or looked terrible.

I'll have another look around!

~~ TS ~~

I think there is a program that allows you to use screensavers as your background. Sorry but I can't remember what it was called. Google the fishtank saver and check the results I remember coming across it.

Backlight, from Freshsqueeze.

Backlight looks cool, and there are a number of programs that allow you to use screensavers as active desktop backgrounds.
Another one is XBack from Gideon http://www.gideonsoftworks.com/xback.html , recently updated 10/2006.
Try looking in MacUpdate or VersionTracker for screensaver and desktop keywords.

FYI, I just checked, there is also a recent item called 3D Desktop Aquarium Screen Saver which is another of the aquarium programs. It is avail as a free-lite or $10-full version, http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/19695 -- perhaps this is what they had?

And there is always the Allume commercial AquaZone program... choices, choices...

Hey everyone

Thanks for all the posts, ill look into them now and see what looks good!

~~ TS ~~

ToddG said:

Backlight, from Freshsqueeze.

Click to expand...

appears to be PPC only...
at least that's what my Activity Monitor told me. Also, it didn't work on my macbook - launched and nothing happened - nothing I could find in system preferences, and no indication that anything happened. A search of my HD resulted in only the downloaded file and the app itself.

FWIW, I think the website said it's Universal; I just ran it and it worked on my MBP C2D.

I tried it on my intel macbook and it seemed fine

dtownley1, all it does is create an icon on the menu bar which when clicked on you can configure the settings of it. (and turn it on)

~~ TS ~~

TenderSurrender hit on it ... when you see the icon in the menubar, that's it. You have to click on that icon to configure and get it started.

BTW & FWIW, I found that it was eating up a fair bit of system resources, especially CPU time, on my 2.33GHz C2D.

In case it's any help, there's another utility - Visage, that also allows you to set screensavers as backgrounds, change login background graphics, etc... and it's definitely a Universal Binary. It's a try-for-free or register for $9.95. I just put it on my machine last night and watched the fishies swim behind the apps. Pretty cool, but pretty distracting after a while.

In Visage you can configure the processor usage for the animation. I found set on Low CPU usage it was eating around 25% of my total processing power (iMac 2.0GHz coreduo).

TenderSurrender said:

I tried it on my intel macbook and it seemed fine

dtownley1, all it does is create an icon on the menu bar which when clicked on you can configure the settings of it. (and turn it on)

~~ TS ~~

Click to expand...

Didn't notice anything in the menu bar.
mm, must have been the dmg then. (I think it was dmg) - sometimes there are iffy dmg's, and often require re-downloading. Activity monitor specified it was PPC.

I'll try it again now just to be sure.


edit: OK, got it to work now. Also, I couldn't find any mention on their site of whether it was intel or not. But this should confirm it:

Download Backlight, and use a lot of things for your desktop.

BackLight 2.0 software download - Mac OS X - VersionTracker

I run the SereneScreen Marine Aquarium 2 (Paid for) for my desktop background.
Ya it cost 20 bucks, but it just looks so good running on the desktop.
Marine Aquarium 2.6 - OS X