If you're like us, you go to sleep with your monitor displaying the latest trendy screensaver. And if you're like us, you unfortunately wake up about a million times a night, wondering whether you have any new email, or any new updates from your favorite blog. Status Screen Saver has got you covered. It displays handy status badges for apps like Mail, NetNewsWire and Twitterrific, so you can see at a glance that nobody's sending you a message at 3 a.m. and go peacefully back to bed.

Status Screen Saver is extremely well-designed. It's technically a screensaver file itself, it just lets you choose which saver you want in its options menu. Other well-thought out features: apps with new updates have red badges, and they're grey if there's nothing new, the icons are resizable, and you can create your own AppleScript modules for apps that aren't already supported. The only very minor quibble we have is that badges get cut off a bit when you get into four-digit numbers, but you can work around this by not having 1100 unread emails.