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Powder Snow And Desktop Picture Application
Sphera Software has released new OS X snow utility called "Powder." Using an "advanced particle engine" and accelerated, OpenGL graphics, Powder makes a convincing virtual snowstorm on your Desktop. Moving your mouse through the snowscape causes the snow to twist turn as if a breeze were blowing through it.
Features include:
• 5 high resolution scenes
• Dozens of custom settings for each scene
• Display on your desktop, full-screen or in a window
The only downside is that it needs to be a powerful Mac if you want to continue working efficiently while the snow is following. Powder also requires Quartz Extreme support in order to work properly.
Powder 1.0.1 comes with a selection of five built-in Desktop pictures, or you can use a favorite of your own. There is a comprehensive selection of preference settings that allow you had to tailor the program's appearance and performance, including weather conditions, night or day, wind speed and direction, snow flake size and intensity, and so forth. You fine-tune your virtual snowfall from flurry to blizzard using pull - down menu selections. My favorite of the picture options that ship with Powder is this street scene.
Anyway, if your Mac has the muscle to handle it, Powder is a great snowfall application.
New in this version:
• Significant performance enhancements, especially for G4's
• Resolution switching in full screen mode
• Use your own background picture
System requirements:
• Mac OS X 10.2 or higher
• Quartz Extreme
Powder 1.0.1 interactive snow on your desktop is $6.95 shareware
For more information, visit:
http://www.sphera-soft.com/powder.html
You can download it here:
http://www.sphera-soft.com/powder.dmg.gz
Snow 1.1 Snow Piling Up On Windows, Santa & Polar Bear On Desktop
For the past several years, running the Classic Mac OS, my favorite snow application has been Rick Jansen's Snow for Macintosh, which lets it snow on your desktop, on your windows, adds a Christmas Tree, and sends Santa and his sleigh flying around your screen for extra festive season cheer. However, one of the cool things about Classic Snow is that since the whole process of letting it snow on your windows is somewhat CPU intensive, if you found Snow slowing down your machine you could use the preferences to choose fewer or smaller snowflakes, no Santa, no tree, or no snow at all. You can set the number of flakes, how fast they fall, Santa's speed limit etc. It all worked very well.
This year, Rick has released an OS X native version of Snow for the Macintosh. It still snows on your desktop and Santa and his reindeer still fly around your screen while snow piles up on top of your windows. However, the tree is gone, having been replaced by an ambling Polar Bear and resizable snowdrop plants. Rudolph the reindeer's nose also glows red once you register the application.
New in this version:
• multi monitor support
• improved performance for non-accelerated displays ("Quartz Extreme") systems
• more types of snow flake
Snow is $10 shareware
For more information, visit:
http://www.xs4all.nl/~janswaal/MacOSXSnow/
Sno
Another snow application for OS X that makes a snowfall on your desktop is David Remahl's Snö (the Swedish name for Snow) which is freeware, OpenSource, and consists of two separate parts; Snö Desktop is a program that makes snow fall on your screen, while you are working with other things at the same time. Snö Screen Saver is a Mac OS X screensaver module. To install this, drag the file to the Screen Savers folder in the Library folder of your home folder:
Mac OS X Drive -> Users -> YourUser -> Library -> Screen Savers
or, to make the module available to all users on the machine, you can put it in:
Mac OS X Drive -> Library -> Screen Savers.
As with Snow, Sno allows you to configure snowflake size and behavior in its preferences.
Sno works well, and its screen rendering of snowflakes is better than with Snow for OS X, but falling snow is the whole enchilada with this application -- no buildup on windows, so Santa,Rudolph, bear, etc.
Snö is freeware, OpenSource, non-copyrighted and totally unsupported.
For more information, visit:
http://hem.passagen.se/dare/
For more information or to download Sno, visit:
http://ittpoi.com/stem.php?product=com.ittpoi.sno&type=frameset
or
http://hem.passagen.se/dare/
Snow Version 2.4
Dave Warker's' Snow is a small, free application for the Mac, categorized as a "Sanity Saver" by its author, that drifts snowflakes down your monitor screen accompanied by the gentle sound of sleigh bells or Christmas music.
You can select the desired snowstorm intensity using the Flakes sub-menu, from gentle flurries to blizzard conditions. Turning on causes some of the flakes to be blown about. Snow supports multiple sets of flakes.
You can also adjust the volume of the jingling sleigh bells, or turn them off completely The Tunes menu requires QuickTime 2.0 or later By default, Snow plays available tunes in random order but you can uncheck the Random Order menu item to hear them sequentially. You can also add more tunes by placing MIDI files in the Snow Tunes folder. Several download site links are included in the program's online documentation.
The package includes sample QuickTime music files of jazzed up holiday favorites. With this release you can now convert MIDI files to QuickTime music files via drag-and-drop.
System Requirements:
This version has only been tested under System 8.1 and later versions of the MacOS, but the basic flakes and sleigh bells should work on any Mac except those that use the original 68000 processor (Mac Plus, SE, Portable and the original 128k/512k Macs.) 68000 based Macs. Users of those machines should continue to use version 2.2. Note that the new music files will work fine with this version. The automatic wake-up feature uses system features that may not be present on recent system releases. It doesn't crash but it is possible that it may wake up when it shouldn't.
Automatic wake up requires System 7 or later. Music requires at least QuickTime 2.0 but for best results you should be using Apple's latest QuickTime package. You can download it from the QuickTime site at http://www.quicktime.apple.com
A jumping off point to other MIDI sites.
http://www.tcmidi.com/
New in version 2.4:
• Can play MP3 audio files if you have QuickTime 4 or later
• Additional snow flake sets
• Fixed a memory leak when aliases are used in the tunes folder
Snow is free for personal use.
For more information, visit:
http://www.warker.com
SnowSaver 1.1b2 OpenGL Falling Snowflakes Screensaver
New in this version:
• Fixed the "textures disappearing after leaving full screen preview" bug; it turns out startAnimation may get called multiple times during the life of a screensaver process.
• Added support for multiple snowflake textures. Texture code changes may also help with the "multiple monitors" bug, but I don't have a setup to test with.
• Added support for snowflake resizing.
• Added nice snowflake textures and custom icon provided by Scott Melchionda.
• Switched to properly-ordered snowflake rasterization.
Product Description:
This is a Cocoa OpenGL screensaver written in Objective C. It's modeled on the pretty falling snowflakes animation that Apple have been running on the iMac in the window of the local Apple store.
Tweakable parameters include snowflake size, depth fog, number of snowflakes, depth of scene, and background color. Defaults should make it look similar to the Apple display.
System requirements:
• Mac OS X 10.1 or higher.
• OpenGL-capable video card.
SnowSaver is freeware
For more information, visit:
http://meta.ath0.com/software/
Snow'ed 1.0
Snow'ed is yet another desktop application that puts snow on your desktop, this time in a window frame. From the menu bar you can choose options like different color window frames and how much snow to fall.
The snow in the application is anti-aliased, and each flake has its own speed and brightness.
You have your choice of four window styles : White, Brown, Moonlit, and Walter Mitty.
Snow'ed 1.0 is only a $1 to Artly There via Kagi as an extra donation when registering something like Compositor (because Kagi bills me $2.50 otherwise for a $1 item) or Simply a $1 donation to anyone-who-has-less-than-you (Go for it).
System requirements:
• "Snow'ed" requires thousands of colors minimum with millions suggested.
• Best at resolution of 800 x 600 or higher, will work at a lower resolution of 640 x 480 though.
For more information, visit:
http://www.artlythere.com/software.shtml
Charles W. Moore
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