Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow… snowy new Mac OS X Screen Effect debuts

“I was walking past the local Apple Store, and saw a really pretty window display: they had a 17″ iMac showing big, fluffy snowflakes falling across an aqua sky. I wanted the same thing for my own iMac, so I decided to write a screensaver that looked the same. After all, I had the developer kit and a book on Cocoa programming, so how hard could it be? Well, quite hard as it turns out… OpenGL is poorly documented in general, there are some nasty details not explained in the Apple screensaver API documentation, and I had to learn Objective C. In addition, at the start of the project I didn’t know how to run screensaver modules from gdb, so initial debugging was a pain. Anyway, my pain is your gain, here’s the result for free,” writes the SnowSaver developer (Matthew?). We tried it – it works on Jag on a PowerBook G4 we know for sure. Info and download link here.