Now featured on Awesome macOS Screensavers!
This is a Mac screensaver that I've been tinkering with since roughly 2002. I run it on all my personal machines, and have given copies to a few friends over the years, but hadn't made it publicly available for download.
After making some updates to it recently, I decided it was time.
Download the latest release here.
Unzip to Matrix.saver and double-click it to install, then go to System Preferences -> Desktop & Screen Saver and pick it from the list.
The "Renderer" popup switches betewen using OpenGL and Metal for rendering. The others are all pretty self-explanatory, although you might have to wait a bit to see what "Minor Instability" does. :)
Release notes:
Version 1.1.5
- Implemented a workaround for a bug in Apple's
legacyScreenSaverprocess that causes increasing CPU and memory consumption every time the screensaver is invoked.- Note that this is a problem with all third-party screensavers, and it has been reported to Apple several times by different people over the past year or two, but it remains unfixed.
- I got the idea from this workaround from a comment on a problem report on another screensaver. The screensaver plugin listens for a notification that the screensaver has been stopped, and calls exit(0) to terminate the process.
- I've also added a checkbox to the screensaver's configuration pane that allows this workaround to be disabled if it causes problems in the future.
Version 1.1.4
- Fix for the black gap on the right edge on displays with a horizontal size that's not an even multiple of 4x the glyph width.
Version 1.1.3
- now built for both Intel and Apple Silicon
Version 1.1.2
- fixed zoom running backwards in OpenGL renderer
- changed some of the internals of how preferences are stored
- renderer selection is now a popup
- changed deployment target to include Mac OS X 10.11, and fixed some issues so it should now work on a 10.11 machine (the Metal renderer is disabled on 10.11 due to some issues there, so it's forced to OpenGL)
Version 1.1.1
- added thumbnail image for screensaver list
- fixed a graphical issue when the preview is moved between Retina and non-Retina displays
Version 1.1
- first public release