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Web Page Screensavers
I don't find myself using screensavers that much these days. Sure, they made sense when you needed to avoid burning a ghost of the windows start bar into your CRT monitor but with TFTs, LEDs, projectors, OLEDs and whatever else, it's rare you'll find hardware that actually needs protecting like that any more. On top of that, in my case, I'm either at my desk coding or at the coffee machine refilling. There aren't that many opportunities for me to appreciate a warp-speed starfield or some infinite pipes.
What I'm saying is: I miss screensavers.
Since I started writing for CreativeJS, I've seen a lot more examples of clever, cool, pretty and downright creative demos and toys written in JS than I ever had before. You can probably figure out where I'm heading with this: these would make cool screensavers.
A quick bit of googling later and I found a couple of applications that let you set a web-page fullscreen as your screensaver. Of course, you can't just set any old demo as your screensaver, many of them rely on user interaction which kinda defeats the purpose.
Downloads
OS X
Unfortunately, this uses plain-old standard WebKit so no WebGL demos. Maybe someone can fork Chromium to make it do this.
Windows
This one seems to be based on IE so it probably won't work with the canvas-based demos below. If you can point me to a WebKit-based one, I'll include that instead.
Old-school screensavers
Flying Windows
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/16145652/flying/flying.html
Starfield by Chiptune
http://www.chiptune.com/starfield/starfield.html
Non-canvas
Insta-Art by me
http://thelab.thingsinjars.com/insta-art.html
Newsola by Nick Nicholaou
Canvas
Falling blocks by Lionel Tardy
http://experiments.lionel.me/blocs
MMOSteroids by Seb Lee-Delisle
http://seb.ly/demos/MMOsteroids.html
Origami by Hakim El Hattab
http://hakim.se/experiments/html5/origami/
The Single Lane Superhighway by Aaron Koblin and Mr.doob
http://www.thesinglelanesuperhighway.com/
Ablaze by Patrick Gunderson
http://theorigin.net/ablazejs/
Visual Random by Dimitrii Pokrovskii
Circle Worm by Ilari
http://style.purkki.ilric.org/projects/js_wave/
Boids by Jason Sundram
http://viz.runningwithdata.com/boids/
3D Globe by Peter Nederlof
http://peterned.home.xs4all.nl/demooo/
Moonlander by Seb Lee-Delisle
http://moonlander.seb.ly/viewer/
WebGL Needed
Just in case someone in the comments finds a WebGL-capable screensaver, here are the demos I liked that require WebGL.
Clouds by Mr.doob
http://mrdoob.com/lab/javascript/webgl/clouds/
WaterStretch by Edouard Coulon
http://waterstretch.ecoulon.com/
Further Development
The ideal screensaver would allow you to enter several different URLs to allow you to easily save them. There should also be a checkbox to mark demos as 'works offline'. That way, when the screensaver starts, it checks for connectivity then displays a screensaver that doesn't require a connection.
Add your suggestions below.
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Nokia Web Dev Blog
Exciting news! The Nokia Web Dev Blog is finally live!
You might remember it was one of my 2012 ToDos and I can now move the To-Do to Done.
So far, I've put two posts up, one on using
background-size: cover
and one on quick prototyping using python SimpleHTTPServer.I'm not convinced a URL with '.../Blogs/blog/...' is necessarily the most memorable so maybe the next task would be to get something catchier. Any suggestions?
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Superhero Libraries
I'm currently writing an introduction course to JS libraries and have decided jQuery is like Batman – Objects are wrapped in a utility belt that does everything but are essentially unchanged underneath – while Prototype is more like Wolverine – Objects are injected with stuff to make them better, stronger, more deadly.
Anyone got any ideas about MooTools?
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Writing, writing and writing
In case anybody's wondering where I've been for the last few weeks (and I know you all have), I've recently joined the CreativeJS team writing about the coolest, shiniest things on the world-wide interwebs. My first post went up last week.
I'm also about to launch the Nokia Web Dev blog (link to come soon) where I get to write tutorials about the coolest, shiniest things we do in Nokia Maps
Don't worry, there won't be fewer articles going up here than before, I just had to spend a couple of weeks figuring out which articles were best suited to where. To make up for a quiet few weeks, here's a picture of some Kohlrabi, a really tasty vegetable barely known outside Germany.