Overview

Assimilator is a screen saver that runs other screen savers on the faces of a rotating cube. To install, copy it to the "Screen Savers" folder in the "Library" folder in your home directory. (Create the "Screen Savers" folder if it does not exist.) Then open the System Preferences application, select the Screen Saver panel, and select "Assimilator" in the list of screen savers. Before Assimilator will display anything interesting, you must select the screen savers to run on the faces of the cube by clicking the "Configure" button. The configuration panel contains six popup menus, from which you can select any number of other screen savers. (If you choose less than six, multiple copies of your selections will be run). Once you have made your selections, click the "OK" button to dismiss the configuration panel and save your selections. When the screen saver activates it should display a bouncing and rotating cube with the screen savers you chose running on its faces.

The configuration panel has several other options:

• Color Cube Edges: If checked, the color of the well to the right of the text will be applied to the cube's edges. Click the well to change the color.
• Show Frames Per Second: If checked, the number of frames drawn per second will be shown in the bottom left corner.
• Use All Screens: By default, Assimilator draws only on the main screen of multi-monitor systems. If this option is selected, it will draw on all screens.

Known Bugs/Issues

• Not all screen savers work with Assimilator, due to the very nonstandard way that Assimilator runs them.
• If you run Assimilator in SaverLab and make configuration changes, they may not take effect in the current window.

Version History

1.2, Apr 30 2005

• Added compatibility with slideshow modules in 10.2 and Quartz Composer modules in 10.4. (Yes, it's been a while).
• Fixed several bugs.

1.1, May 19 2001

• Fixed screen saver search path; now looks for screen savers in the same places as System Preferences.
• Improved performance by only drawing the 1-3 faces of the cube that are visible (the previous version always drew 3 faces).
• Added configuration options to control edge color and whether to draw on all screens.
• Improved compatibility with SaverLab; windows can now be resized without losing textures.

1.0, May 15 2001: initial release

Credits

• Mike Trent and Bill Bumgarner, for valuable feedback and advice.
• Peter Ammon, for sample code to grab pixels from an NSOpenGLView.
• Eric Peyton, whose screen saver code at epicware is extremely useful.

Feedback

Contact me with any bug reports, comments, or suggestions at brian@dozingcat.com.

Technical Information

Assimilator works by creating six invisible (fully transparent) windows in which it runs the screen saver modules which appear on the cube. Every time it draws the cube, it extracts the contents of the windows and uses them as OpenGL textures, which it applies to the faces of the cube. Getting the window contents is normally done with -[NSBitmapImageRep initWithFocusedViewRect:]. However this does not work for screen savers which use OpenGL, since OpenGL graphics are drawn in such a way that AppKit can't see them. The contents of an OpenGL view are accessible using the glReadPixels() function, although it results in a flipped image due to the different coordinate systems used by OpenGL and AppKit. ASOpenGLViewExtensions.m defines a possibly useful category method on NSOpenGLView which extracts the contents of an OpenGL view as an NSBitmapImageRep, including "un-flipping" the image.

License

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.