12 Days of holiday downloads, Day 1: Mac
by Jay Savage Dec 1st 2006 at 3:00PM
Okay, so the 12 Days of Christmas don't technically start until after Chirstmas, but that wouldn't give you much time to enjoy your yearly dose of on-screen holiday cheer, now would it? So in order to get everyone in the spirit, we present a series of downloads that serve absolutely no purpose whatsoever, other than brightening up that dreary desktop. First up is one of my all-time favorites: Infinity to the Power of Infinity's Snö. Snö is a OS X application and screensaver that makes a gentle snow fall over your desktop, bringing a little life to your otherwise static background. If you're really adventurous, you can even set it to run in a floating window. That's festive, but tends to make work nearly impossible. there's an included screensaver, too, but since ittpoi seems to have dropped of the face of the earth recently, it hasn't been updated for 10.4 (come to think of it, I'm not sure it was updated for 10.3). But hey, it's the "oldie" component that makes and "oldie but goody," right?
If you have some spare time, Snö is open source. So feel free to track down that Tiger bug in the screensaver and recompile it. Just let me know if you do.
With Halloween fast approaching, it's a great time to get in some practice defending your territory against zombies. In Graveyard Shift, you take aim at zombies and other creepy-crawlies, blasting them into splatters of cartoony green guts. It's a casual first-person shooter, and it's very easy to get the hang of - use the mouse to aim, click to fire. Graveyard Shift has at least 15 levels, and it might even have some secret stages I haven't unlocked yet.
They key to getting good at Graveyard Shift is learning to use ...
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
W. Graves said 6:33PM on 12-01-2006
This is really cool, the girlfriend loves it but it eats my macbook pro alive. on the basic settings it consumes about 45-60% of both proccessors, but with a little tweaking it drops to 30-40%, hot but bearable. rossetta sucks.
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Daniel Schlaug said 9:45AM on 12-05-2006
A better alternative to this if you want snow that doesn't eat your comp alive is to find a Quartz Composition and use it as a desktop BG with Quartz Desktop. Search for Snow at http://www.quartzcompositions.com/
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Andrew Fitzpatrick said 12:22PM on 12-16-2006
The best alternative is to use Backlight 2 (http://freshsqueeze.com/products/freeware/) and the LotsaSnow screensaver (http://wakaba.c3.cx/s/lotsablankers/lotsasnow.html) or any other screensaver you like.
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