A Blizzard on Your Mac Desktop
While waiting for the first snow to fall in Germany I’ve discovered some neat free Mac apps that help you satisfy your snow hungry eye and mind…
LotsaSnow
The LotsaSnow screensaver for Mac OS X renders beautiful snowflakes falling down your screen. You can decide between a gradient background colored with your favorite color and your dimmed desktop with all active windows. Its developer adds:
Simple enough, but the oh-so-clever part is that it uses a semi-physical model for growing each snowflake, meaning every snowflake is actually unique, and also that it uses a quite a bit of processing power. But that’s the price you pay for indivduality!
You can control the colors for your gradient background and the dimming of your desktop if you prefer it as the background. I’ve played a bit with LotsaSnow and found these settings to be my perfect winter placebo.
Snowfall
You prefer 3D snowflakes or want a Quartz Composer file to play with (maybe add your iSight image as a background to the snow)? Then you should try Snowfall. Putting the .qtz file into ~/Library/Screen Savers/ adds it to your System Preferences’ “Desktop & Screen Saver” pane.
Snjór
Snjór‘s whole purpose is to let snowflakes fall inn front of your desktop. You can control the total number and speed of the flakes and decide whether they stay on the active window’s top or distract you from working which is also very nice. The download site is also a very nice example of a clean page for this kind of application.
Snowplane
Similar to Snjór Snowplane but incorporating kind of a physical model Snowplane also does the whole let-it-snow thing on your Mac desktop but the flakes change their direction when near your mouse cursor while it’s clicked. Try dragging around an icon or selecting some text after you’ve activated Snowplane.