BackLight – ScreenSaver as your Desktop Background
Have you ever thought it’d be cool to use a screensaver as your desktop background? Freshly Squeezed Software thought it would be, so they made a super easy to use application to render any Mac OS X screensaver as your background. BackLight provides a menu to easily select a screensaver and turn the desktop effect on and off. BackLight is pure eye candy, and it easily satisifies your desktop indulgence.
As you can see the menu is simple and self explanatory. As said before, this program is pure eye candy and probably not the best thing to run constantly in the background while you’re trying to do anything processor intensive. BackLight hogs about 8-10% CPU on a 2ghz Core Duo machine, as you can see in the screenshot of ‘top’ running. All in all, it’s a fun app and is sure to attract some attention and jealously from your Windows using friends. Enjoy!
Update: BackLight looks to no longer exist, but a different app called WallSaver achieves similar results.
There is an incredibly simple Widget that does all of this and more:
http://www.apaulodesign.com/widgets/wallsaver.php
I like this Widget solution because doesn’t “install” anything on your system and you can check all the code for bad content.
Back light is a nice addition to any Mac but it can’t handle certain screen savers such as downloaded one’s. That’s I use SaverLab. It far surpasses Backlight in many ways. Transparency effects in addition to having another screen saver or your desktop wallpaper in the background. Give it a try at http://www.dozingcatsoftware.com/
[…] The screensaver by itself is nice and certainly puts a winter tranquil mood to your resting Mac, but one of my favorite things to do is to combine this screensaver with BackLight. BackLight is a small program that allows screensavers to run as the background of your desktop, and this combination creates the best looking falling snow effect I have found for the Mac. So winterize your Mac and let the snow fall! […]
Probably just a frontend to running:
/System/Library/Frameworks/ScreenSaver.framework/Resources/ScreenSaverEngine.app/Contents/MacOS/ScreenSaverEngine -background
in a terminal. But pretty cool nonetheless.