Get a Gorgeous iOS 7 Lock Screen Inspired Screen Saver for Mac OS X
Though some of iOS 7’s appearance has become a matter of controversy, the one portion of the iOS facelift that is practically universally adored is the new, simplified, image-focused lock screen, which displays nothing but a clock and the date in minimally thin text overlaid against the devices wallpaper. It’s beautiful, and now thanks to a third party developer you can get that same gorgeously simple lock screen on your Mac through the usage of a free screen saver.
The screen saver is titled “iOS 7 lockscreen”, as it very closely mimics the appearance of the initial lock screen seen on an iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch running iOS 7.0 or newer. To get the actual locked screen functionality in OS X you’ll need to separately enable password protection for screen savers and then use a timer, keystroke, or hot corner to send the screen into the locked mode, which will work with any screen saver and not just this one – if you haven’t done that yet, you really should as it offers a simple method to protect a Mac from unauthorized access.
Anyway, back to the beautiful screen saver, here’s how you can get this working on your Mac:
- Download the free screen saver from BodySoulSpirit (or use this direct link) and mount the disk image
- Open a new Finder window, then hit Command+Shift+G to summon Go To Folder and enter the following path:
- Drag and drop the “iOS 7 lockscreen by bodysoulspirit.qtz” file into the “Screen Savers” folder you just opened
- Launch System Preferences from the Apple menu and go to the “Desktop & Screen Saver” control panel
- Click on the “Screen Saver” tab to find the new “iOS 7 lock screen” screen saver option
- Click on “Screen Saver Options” to customize it to your liking, hit “Preview” to see what things will look like
- Optional but highly recommended for all Mac users with all screen savers: enable password protection for locked screens in OS X
~/Library/Screen Savers/
Hitting the Options button provides more customization than you may expect, including the ability to change the background image, adjust the time format from a 12 hour to 24 hour clock, whether or not to show the AM/PM indicators, adjust the date format, whether the text is black or white, and even a ton of very specific tweaks to the size of the clock and text itself.
You can also change the “Press any key to unlock” text if you want it to say something else, putting a message like your name and contact details here is generally good protocol so that it’s visible on the lock screen.
The screen saver has a very slight animation that causes images to zoom in and out extremely slowly, sort of mimicking the iOS lock screen that zooms in when an iPhone or iPad is woken up. You can change that along with everything else if you decide you don’t like the movement.
If this proves to be a tease and you want to go further into the iOSification of OS X, you can follow some tips to make the Mac desktop look a lot more like iOS by changing a variety of settings, though it’s certainly not for everyone.
Heads up to RedmondPie for finding this awesome screen saver.
It took me a few tries to get this figured out.
I was looking in the primary fields to select the screensaver, where you would normally choose a photo album… thinking it would show up there.
Ah, finally… after much shigrin and trying to put the quartz file in different places, I realized that one selects the file from the screensaver ‘style’ area, on the left… under Ken Burns, Word of the Day, etc…
One tip, is to right click (or conrol+click) the quartz file, and choose Open, to allow Gatekeeper to open the file with Quicktime, essentially making your system recognize the file as a trusted application.
I’m suspicious there is something in the background for this screensaver. This was the last thing installed on my 11 month old mac. The drive is now corrupted. Not sure if it’s related but a word of caution. I’ve had macs for years, seeing others are seeing high gpu usage and finder hangs. I’d avoid this. It’s pretty but not worth it.
Downloaded everything as described. Seems that it is freezing my mbp though for some reason. “System Preferences” stalls every time I try to use it and quits responding. The one time that it actually did respond and entered into screen saver mode all I got was a black screen and had to reboot my mac because it wouldn’t wake up. I was really looking forward to this too, I’ve been getting a little bored with Minimal Clock if that is even possible.
Nice screensaver, but a bit sad that it uses so much GPU and/or CPU that it makes the fan start to make noise (at least on the 15″ MacBook Pro from 2010 that I tried it on).
Here is a service done in Automator that runs a shell script to start the screen saver in OS X:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2096906/Start_Screensaver.workflow.zip
This is the code, so nothing dangerous:
open -a /System/Library/Frameworks/ScreenSaver.framework/Versions/A/Resources/ScreenSaverEngine.app
If you extract the .zip file and then put extracted file ”Start Screensaver.workflow” into ~/Library/Services you can then go to System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts and under ”Services” you will find ”Start Screen Saver” (under ”General” in the list).
You can then set a keyboard combo to invoke the screen saver. It seems one has to include the ”cmd” key for it to work (I tried ”ctrl shift S” first, but that didn’t seem to work).
Tested on OS X 10.9.1, don’t know how if it will work or not on other OS X versions.
The screen saver is so smooth and I love it, you can download the wallpaper here http://www.coalesceideas.com/ios-7-galaxy/
Where can I get this Milky Way-ish wallpaper? Love the screensaver.
omg, it was there, ups..
Here is a great bokey cityscape wallpaper for this screen shot and OS X / iOS in general
http://d.pr/i/GIrU
Doesn’t install for me. When I try to mount the disk image, nothing happens. Weird.
Doesn’t install for me. When I try to mount the disk image, nothing happens. Weird.
Edit: Ignore that, figured it out. For some reason, it wasn’t automatically opening a Finder windows. When I manually opened Finder, I found the disk image.
Open a new Finder window, then hit Command+Shift+G to summon Go To Folder and enter the following path:
~/Library/Screen Savers/
Or you can just drag the file to the Screen Savers alias that is included in the disk image. That is why the alias is there.
The included alias points to /Library/Screen Savers/ which requires an admin password and installs for all users, rather than ~/Library/Screen Savers/ which requires no password and installs for the currently active user
You are correct. I do seldom choose to install screen savers. But, when I do, this is the method in which I install them.
Where can I find this great red wallpaper? Thanks for the article!
It’s an image from the Puyehue volcano in Chile erupting, try this link for the wallpaper:
http://pix.avaxnews.com/avaxnews/4a/76/0000764a.jpeg
you can find some nice wallpaper is hide on your os in this link
https://osxdaily.com/2013/10/25/access-40-hidden-wallpapers-os-x-mavericks/