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.

Sure, you make fun of the chintzy Time Machine animation when you're out to sushi with your geek friends, but secretly you adore it. When the night is late, and it's just you and your Mac, you turn on Time Machine simply to gaze longingly into its starry goodness.

But don't you wish that you could just get that pesky Finder window out of the way, so you could stare into the full, unadulterated Time Machine backdrop? Well, we've got the next best thing, friend: the Time Machine Screensaver.

The Time Machine Screensaver is a Quartz Composer Movie that is pretty much an exact clone of the Time Machine animation. To install the screensaver, you can drag it onto the Screen Saver window, or put it into your default Screen Saver folder, or copy it to the Screen Saver alias included with the download. Once you see it in your Screen Saver preferences, select the Time Machine Screen Saver, and off you go.

Now, it's just you and the Time Machine. Face to face.

If you want something a little more "Leopard" themed, with the colors from the default Aurora desktop picture, you can download it from the Time Machine Screen Saver discussion forum.

[via Softpedia]

FaaRClock 1.0 is a program for Windows that displays a simple and very readable analog clock as your computer's screensaver. We're almost positive that this is the screensaver Flavor Flav has installed on his computer.

The download and install is simple. Upon existing the installation, you'll be prompted to make FaaRClock your default screensaver.

Additional settings are available in the screensaver tab found in your Windows Display Properties. Those settings allow you to:

• Choose a background color
• Set an input method to wake up the computer (mouse click, mouse movement, customized hot key, etc...)

FaaRClock is a nice idea for our increasingly virtual homes, where the only clocks in the house are on our computers and cell phones. With FaaRClock up and running, you can see the time without having to lug yourself across the room.

The only requirement is Windows 2000, XP, Vista, and Flash Player 8 or higher. FaaRClock 1.0 is free.

If you've ever worked with Flash, and have thought "hey, this Flash file would make a cool Screensaver," then today is your lucky day. InstantStorm is a free program that converts your flash movies into Screensavers quickly and easily.

InstantStorm downloads as a small (2.7 MB) file, and the install is straightforward. When you start up InstantStorm, you have the option of creating a new project from scratch, using the New Project Wizard, or opening an existing project.

The New Project Wizard is a good way to get your feet wet before building a project from scratch. The wizard guides you through naming the Screensaver, choosing a Flash file, and selecting a bitmap image to use in the installation screen. Once all the selections are made, click create and your Screensaver is saved as an executable. Double-click the executable file and your Screensaver is installed.

InstantStorm allows you to customize your new Screensaver in a number of ways, including scaling of your Screensaver image, the ability to create Screensaver desktop shortcuts, WYSIWYG designers for your Screensaver's installer, and more.

InstantStorm is a free download, Windows only.

[via Brown Thoughts]

Is your Windows screensaver getting stale? Does it consist of the same old pictures from your hard drive? Spice things up with Chirpscreen, an interactive screen saver that automatically updates with content from your Facebook and Flickr accounts, including content from your friends.

Chirpscreen is the first offering from Chirp, a company whose stated goal is to tackle the problems of social information overload. We're not sure why a screensaver that displays the information from your social networks should save you from overload; in fact, it seems more of an overload to have a screensaver that displays social content rather than simply a blank screen, aquarium, or otherwise.

With Chirpscreen activated, you'll see the pictures and updates from your friends swim slowly across your screen. Each piece of content is a hyperlink that, when clicked, will open a web browser and take you directly to the content in question.

As of now, you have three main portals in Chirpscreen: your Facebook account, Flickr account, and the option to pull in public Flickr images based upon generic tags of your choosing. Chirp hopes to add many more content options in the near future (and they'd love to hear what content you'd most like to see in your Chirpscreen).

Chirpscreen is currently in beta, and available for Windows only (the Mac version is coming soon).

The one thing that drives us nuts about Apple's iCal calendaring software is its reminder system. After several revisions, iCal's reminder selections are still gumpy and time-consuming, and it's still not possible to set a default reminder timeframe, so you have to add three or four mouse clicks to every event in order to set up a reminder, each and every time. Getting timely reminders from iCal is therefore a pain, as programming the alerts takes more work than ought to be necessary.

Fortunately, there's an easier way to display scheduled events than simply using reminders. iCalViewer is an application that can be used as a screensaver, showing your entire schedule in a colorful view whenever your Mac's saver kicks on. You can also park the view under the Finder, on the desktop. For those of us who require a lot of nagging, this isn't just handy--it's indispensable.

An interesting new addition has emerged in the Google Pack. Added to the likes of Symantec's Norton Security Scan, PC Tools Spyware Doctor, Google Desktop, Google Toolbar, Picasa, Adobe Reader, and Mozilla Firefox, comes the freshly rebuilt Google Screensaver.

The Google Screensaver allows users to display photos from within your computer, or through photo sharing sites in a simple screensaver type format.

Screensaver works with Picasa, Picasa Web Albums, computer folders, or photo feeds to display photos on a sleeping screen. Of course effects can be added to the transitioning of photos including Collage, wipe, cross fade, pan and zoom, and time intervals can be set as well.

If anyone has any great photo feeds from Flickr or anywhere else, please drop them in the comments.

For our 12th day of Mac downloads, I have a very merry Mac Christmas screensaver: Skyrocket Software's Frosted. Why is it so very merry Mac? Because it features a talking snowman and talking Santa that use the the Mac's built-in Text-to-Speech interface. And best of all for Mac geeks, they use two of the most traditional Mac voices: Bruce for the Snowman, Fred for Santa. Actually, the synthesized voices are a little creepy. Fun creepy, though, in a way that takes you right back to OS 9. The sprite-based animation will take you back, too. But isn't that what the holidays are all about, tradition?

All jokes aside, though, that Mac geek on your Christmas list (maybe your inner Mac geek?) will get a kick out of it.

The free version is fully functional and not even nagware. The $5.00 registration will turn on some sound options and let the snowman say your name.

Previous 12 Days of holidays downloads for OS X:
Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, Day 5, Day 6, Day 7, Day 8, Day 9, Day 10, Day 11

Today's Mac download is A Very 3D Christmas Screensaver by Rob Bennet of Useless Creations. As 3D screensavers go, this one is pretty well done. You get to watch Santa fly through the sky and hop down chimneys from a number of different angles and the OpenGL rendering is fast and smooth. The saver will play your choice of Christmas carol (from a predefined list of 50+) and counts down the second to Christmas at you locale.

It is nagware (full version is $7.50), but it's not crippleware, and as an added bonus there's a Windows version, too, if you roll that way.

Previous 12 Days of holidays downloads for OS X:
Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, Day 5, Day 6, Day 7, Day 8, Day 9, Day 10

Today's holiday downloads is Free New Year ScreenSaver from Download for Free. It's not the world's most sophisticated saver, but it has falling snow, and anyone who's been following this feature knows I'm a sucker for that. And it plays the Twelve Days of Christmas, which just seems appropriate.

Previous 12 Days of holiday downloads for Windows:
Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, Day 5, Day 6, Day 7, Day 8, Day 9, Day 10

Today, I present you with: the Crispy Christmas screensaver. I have no idea what's crispy about Christmas, but with a name like that, I just had to pass it along. Actually, there's a lot about this screensaver that I just don't get, like the kangaroos jumping out of the piper's horn and the thing that looks suspiciously like a d20 that flies around periodically. That's ok by me, though. It may be twisted, but it's my kind of twisted. I thought Santa jumping his sleigh over the "In Excelsis" scroll was a particularly nice touch.

Mac users feel left out? Don't. It seems has though FlashFast, the people behind the fun bit of insanity, have started putting out Mac content, too. the download bundle includes on OS X screensaver module, too. Free 7 day trial; $10 to keep it if you want.

Previous 12 days of holiday downloads for Windows:
Day 1

Well, the Mac users got their first dose of Christmas today and we wouldn't want the rest of you to feel left out, so here it is: your first Windows screensaver of the season. 3Planesoft's Christmas saver features a 3D snowman getting ready for the big day, complete with tree-trimming, confetti crackers, and steel drum carols on the old phonograph. Free to try, $10.95 to own.

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.