g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets
  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.


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Thursday, September 5, 2002
14:19 - Blending In
http://www.serenescreen.com

(top) link

Today's "Kevin & Kell" is the latest in a recent streak of Apple/Mac-related strips, in an engaging storyline that does justice to the wide world of Mac-happy comics (like FoxTrot and even Doonesbury-- the latter of which has an interesting entry today which lip-serves blogs and SUVs alike).

The infiltration of Macs into the Windows World goes on apace. And just as in the strip above, we've now reached another milestone: the "Marine Aquarium" screen saver, that OpenGL-based one with the rendered fish and the bubbles and lighting and everything that's always on everybody's machine in every workplace and on every monitor on display for sale at Fry's, is available for Mac OS X.



I don't know how recent a development this is-- it could have just been posted today, or maybe it's been out for months-- but it works excellently, even properly handling widescreen monitors like on Kris' TiBook, and employing Cocoa GUI elements like sheets and transparency. Drop-shadows even work right on top of the display window (in the application version of the screen saver), which means this is all being done in hardware, apparently. Kris gets about 50 fps on his machine, and I get around 25, which isn't too bad, though in standalone application mode my iMac does over 100. (And yes, there's an OS 9 version in beta as well.)

I'm probably not going to switch away from Flurry just yet. But if I ever have the need to lie low in the office and avoid the watchful eye of the Ministry of Prevention of Macs and Promotion of Aquarium Screen Savers, I'll have my camouflage ready.



UPDATE: Actually I'm getting almost 60 fps now when running the registered version. I don't know if that's because registering it unlocks more optimizations or something, or if there was just something else running earlier that was sucking up cycles. I suppose Occam's Razor applies: the keycode obviously unlocks esoteric optimizations in a fiendish plot to cripple the eyesight of deadbeats through the use of a barely perceptible jagginess in frame rate.



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© Brian Tiemann