saver

Review: Plasma Tunnel Screensaver creates a customized plasma tunnel effect

As a screensaver, Plasma Tunnel Screensaver for Mac works well and is quite unique, but its design and operation are very one dimensional. The animation follows a tube with different colors, but does not add any different areas of movements or additional effects. The user can customize the colors, though.

The program installs directly onto the screensaver area of the Mac and comes with a README file. Opening the System Preferences menu lets the user select the Plasma Tunnel Screensaver for Mac as the default screensaver. Either allowing it to activate or starting the preview brings up a first-person camera … Read more

Review: Display a cool, retro digital clock screensaver with Clock Saver

Combine a screensaver with a full-screen digital clock display and you have Clock Saver. This free, Flash-based screensaver is small in size but big in impact: You can see its digital display across a very large room. It displays hours, minutes, and seconds as well as AM/PM and the day of the week. Lots of apps do that, you say, and some do more. Sure; but Clock Saver has two things going for it: Its utter simplicity and its retro-cool, low-res digits, which look like something from the Moon Age. You'll need Flash Player to use this screensaver. … Read more

Review: Paint your Mac desktop black with Blank Screen Saver

Having a really cool screensaver can be fun, but if you can't make up your mind, or just want a total change, you can try a screen with absolutely nothing on it. Blank Screen Saver for Mac comes with no surprises. It is a basic, easy-to- install screensaver intended to increase the life of your computer screen.

At only around 42KB, Blank Screen Saver for Mac downloads in the blink of an eye and is just as easy to install. It is basically just a bare bones screensaver that displays a black screen. All the user has to do … Read more

Five Android apps that prolong your smartphone's battery life

Have you found yourself wishing that your Android's battery would last longer? Don't answer that, I already know. Be it poor app design, ever-larger display sizes, or our constant desire to play mobile games, we're eating up battery life faster than we'd like.

As a platform, Android has improved with each iteration and task management, and multitasking keeps getting smarter.

With that said, one of the first complaints from new smartphone users is that the battery doesn't seem to live up to expectations. Sure, the 2013 crop of flagship phones seems promising, but not everyone … Read more

Display a beautiful Unix-style screensaver on your Mac with XScreenSaver for Mac pack

Screensavers and automatic screen economy modes are certainly not new. If you wish to have more choices, however, XScreenSaver for Mac offers the perfect solution.

On opening, XScreenSaver for Mac offers a long list of screensaver files and a single readme file. If you currently run on the recommended system quarantine mode, which will only let you install Apple-approved programs, you might have to cut and paste the terminal commands found in the readme file. The start isn't great, but the rest is. From there you can simply double-click the screensavers and they will install. You can open System … Read more

Infected Screen Saver is a cool old-school variation on the Matrix look

Matrix-style screensavers have been around almost as long as the "Matrix" movies, and in many variations of the original falling-code theme. It's an iconic look that says "computers" the way Greek columns say "buildings," and is just as easily renewed. Vastimil Burian's Infected Screen Saver is a good example. It's based on the original Matrix code look, but it "infects" your screen with code when it's activated. The effect is cool, of course, like the many "original" variations, but Infected Screen Saver is different. For starters, … Read more

Interact with OS X screensavers

Apple includes a number of screensavers in OS X that provide you with options to exercise your display and prevent LCD ghosting, CRT burn-in (if you still use a CRT monitor), or other persistent images from being a nuisance. As with most screen savers, you can deactivate them by moving your mouse or pressing a button on your keyboard; however, this may not always be the case, and depending on the screensaver being used you may instead find the screensaver will persist even when some inputs are pressed.

Advance photos in slideshows Apple includes a number of slideshow screensavers that … Read more

How to change slideshow duration times in OS X

As part of OS X, Apple provides a number of styled screensaver options for displaying photographs and images you have stored in your iTunes or Aperture libraries when you are not at your computer. These options are fun to use; however, they are quite limited in the settings they offer, as there are practically no options to customize them.

At most, you can set the screensaver to shuffle the slide order and choose a source for the photos, but you cannot change the duration of the transitions or perhaps, more importantly for some people, the time in which the screensaver … Read more

Six iOS apps you'll thank me for (you're welcome)

With all the time I spend sifting through the iOS App Store and writing reviews, there simply isn't time to use every app regularly. Still, I find that just about every month there are a new handful of apps and games that I keep coming back to.

These aren't the best apps of all time and I'm not declaring them as the best apps even for right now; these are simply the ones that have grabbed my attention and have been getting the most use on my personal home screen.

If you see something here and think, &… Read more

Use your Mac's internal graphics to save battery life

If you have a MacBook system that contains dual graphics cards, then you have the option of enabling either the internal graphics or the discrete graphics card, depending on the hardware demands of the tasks you are running.

Integrated or "internal" graphics functions are included on the Intel processor in your Mac (though some prior Mac systems used Nvidia chipsets with Nvidia-branded internal graphics). This graphics option is relatively slow but also draws far less power than a dedicated graphics processor. The integrated graphics are powered fully when the system is turned on.

If your system includes a … Read more