Screensavers these days are decorative more than anything else, but rather than the usual fare of beautiful images which can be used as screensavers, here are 7 screensavers which actually do something useful:
1. A Screensaver That Can Help Cure Cancer
Folding@home is a distributed computing project — people from throughout the world download and run software to band together to make one of the largest supercomputers in the world. By participating, your PC will download a small chunk of cancer research data, processes it, and send it back to the Stanford University, and it repeats the process for as long as your PC is idle which makes this the most altruistic screensaver around. When you step away for a cup of coffee, you’re actually saving the world :)
2. A Screensaver That Helps You Learn from Wikipedia
Discover new things every day with Wikipedia screensaver. The Wikipedia screensaver loads random pages from Wikipedia every 30 seconds or so so you’ll be treated to an interesting tidbit of information when you return to you PC. On top of its Wikipedia features, it can be configured to kill any program on activation (for example documents or browsers) to ensure complete privacy while you’re away from your desk.
3. A Screensaver That Helps You Get the Hottest News
Digg.com is one of the best places to read the absolute hottest news out there today. What they also do is create visualization models which allow you to quickly discern and pickup hot pieces of news. All of which can be found in their Digg Labs section. Pick one of the visualization tools, and you’ll be able to download a screensaver version there as well, so now your screensaver will show hot news stories flashing up on your screen in real time.
4. A Screensaver That Stumbles Across Awesome Photos
Slickr is a Flickr screen saver that you can set up to show images by:
- User – Favorites, Set, Tags, Contacts
- Group
- Everyone – Tags, Recent, Interestingness
- Local files/directories (So you can use your own images on your hard drive)
5. A Screensaver That Shows You Breaking News Happening Around the World
MappedUp is an application that tracks a large number of RSS news sources and displays their latest items on a world map so you can see where the breaking news is originating from. Very elegant in design and a joy to watch.
6. A Screensaver That Helps You Understand Geography
Cities of Earth is a free 3D screensaver wich shows biggest cities of our planet as you can see it from the space. Many of cities with information about its population and country names. So it’s a good educational content. The positions of all cities corresponds to its real world coordinates. You can also adjust camera positions.
7. A Screensaver That Acts as a Feedreader
RSSMore is a free screensaver that lets you subscribe to any number of RSS feeds and view them as a screen saver. You can even display web pages in their original form, so you can include non-RSS sites in your playlist!
8. A Screensaver That Shows You Global Blog Activity
Twingly screensaver is visualizing the global blog activity in real time. Forget RSS readers where you see only what you’re interested in. With Twingly screensaver you get a 24/7 stream of all (viewer discretion advised) blog activity, straight to your screen. Check out the video for a quick preview.
9. A Screensaver That Visualizes Twitter Messages Across the Globe
Twittearth is an interesting app which taps into Twitter’s live stream to show you tweets from all over the globe while showing you which part of the world it came from. An absolutely beautiful piece of eye candy.
February 2nd, 2009 at 12:43 am
Nice find. I thought the screensaver business is dead. I wish you could find the 10th.
February 2nd, 2009 at 2:32 pm
I’d love to find a 10th too – readers, come chip in your favorite screensaver :)
February 2nd, 2009 at 7:33 pm
wow, did not know that screen saver could be live(connect to the internet).
Nice one, will try one now.
February 2nd, 2009 at 10:11 pm
Are they Virus and Spam free? I would love one that is
a dictionary.
Thanks for your great webstuff.
February 2nd, 2009 at 10:56 pm
JKDefrag has a screen saver mode that will defragment your hard drive while being a screen saver.
http://www.kessels.com/JkDefrag/
February 2nd, 2009 at 11:26 pm
@Scamboy & Bobbi: Thanks for the kind words, yes they are virus/spam free.
@Bobbi: What would you do with a screensaver dictionary? :)
February 3rd, 2009 at 6:26 am
Electric Sheep is pretty dope as well. I get compliments on the visuals all the time… http://electricsheep.org/
February 3rd, 2009 at 6:27 am
Great. Now I’ll be sitting idly by my machine waiting for my new screen savers to come on… ;)
February 3rd, 2009 at 6:31 am
Cities of Earth does not have any uri/link.
maybe this one ?
http://cities-of-earth-free-3d-screensaver.en.softonic.com/
and please include if it’s for Windows or Macs..
February 3rd, 2009 at 7:20 am
How does the Cancer Folding@Home work as a screensaver? It seems to run in the background continuously and doesn’t show up as a screensaver option. (Windows)
February 3rd, 2009 at 7:51 am
I miss the old flying toasters!!
February 3rd, 2009 at 8:29 am
There was this designer I used to work with that had a screensaver that featured falling Helvetica numbers (and possibly also letters?) through water. It was beautiful to look at.
February 3rd, 2009 at 10:53 am
I’m using Fontpark Morisawa but these all screensaver perhaps need internet connection.
here’s my suggestion = fontpark morisawa = http://fontpark.morisawa.co.jp/permalink?id=m1onbsd7ay0lloy
It’s a gallery but you can download the screensaver application to fethc the drawings
February 3rd, 2009 at 12:04 pm
@Jesse: Defragging – now that’s a useful way to screensave!
@Starlight: Looks great
@Bjorn: nice – which did you pick?
@Gabyu: Thanks for spotting – link is fixed!
@IsaihQ: It’s not controlled via Windows – it just works in the background when your PC is idle, but you can set it to act as a screensaver too if you like. Set the options via the app itself, not Windows screensaver settings.
@Jerome: So do I! Ahh.. afterdark toasters
@Tekong & Erica: Nice – I still appreciate design oriented screensavers :)
February 4th, 2009 at 2:29 am
Since someone already mentioned the Electric Sheep I can only add two things:
1. Apart form Folding@Home the World Community Grid has many more “Screensavers” that serve different purposes e.g. finde a cure for Aids or a better rice to feed the world etc. (http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/)
2. As for awesome photos, for everyone who has a FFFFOUND-Account there is also a screensaver that shows all your ffffound images. Awesome, I say. (http://ffffound.com/)
February 4th, 2009 at 3:45 am
I like this screen saver called Analogy.
http://www.jessonyip.com/analogy/
Runs on Mac or PC.
February 4th, 2009 at 9:56 pm
gPhotoShow (screensaver) and Wallpaper SlideShow (wallpaper) let you randomly display your own photos as a screensaver and wallpaper. Very flexible. Includes support for displaying photo information like filename, date and EXIF and IPTC information. This lets you display What/Where/When. I have found no other products that do this. (See http://www.gphotoshow.com)
February 5th, 2009 at 4:43 am
Erica, you mean the dropclock. I agree, it is very nice.
http://scr.sc/products/dropclock/
February 5th, 2009 at 6:27 am
I recommend mentioning GridRepublic (http://www.gridrepublic.org) a non-profit working in collaboration with BOINC to bring together research projects from around the world who utilize idle computers for research for good like Folding@home, but with a broader range of topics including climate, energy, space, and much more. See a list of the projects here: http://www.gridrepublic.org/projects GridRepublic makes everything simple and easy for finding, joining, and controlling what projects and as many computers as you want to have join.
February 5th, 2009 at 4:29 pm
Lookup BOINC, this is an umbrella saver that with a related tool like BAM can switch between different distributed computing projects like the Folding experiment. The manager links them together so you can participate in various projects eg SETI, Malaria control etc.
You can join teams, run the program continuously or just when idle.
February 9th, 2009 at 10:24 pm
my fav would be polarclock and fliqlo!
February 10th, 2009 at 2:32 pm
I have what I think is the perfect nomination for a 10th! It’s for the University of California at Berkeley’s SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) program, SETI@Home. Much like the cancer research screensaver, it uses your computer’s idle processing power to analyze a small chunk of the huge amounts of data collected from radio telescopes pointed into space to try to find patterns in all the “space noise.” Someday someone might decode something that was generated by intelligent life elsewhere.
February 27th, 2009 at 8:43 am
Electric sheep is a pretty cool screensaver. Check it out.
March 11th, 2009 at 3:08 pm
Really amazing screensavers! I like the screensaver which shows the global blogs activity! Awesome!!
March 13th, 2009 at 5:53 pm
dropclock is 137MB download!?
March 30th, 2009 at 12:32 am
Whitecap from http://www.soundspectrum.com shows pretty smart and mathematical(perhaps) visual designs on screen. It’s very cute with bright changing colors and backgrounds. The blend of shapes and lines from one to another is great. It’s basically a visualization software for Media Players and the screen saver is a bonus. It works for most of the Media Player but unfortunately its not free.
I would greatly recommend to try the demo.
June 12th, 2009 at 5:06 am
According to ZoneAlarm anti-spyware, the Digg Arc screensaver has a trojan in it. Can anybody verify this?
September 14th, 2009 at 2:19 am
Ten screensavers http://www.filerex.com/get/windows/desktop_utilities/screensavers/