SpiroScales & LizardView; Source for Snow Leopard Available
Monday, October 19th, 2009Hah! While the NeXT system in my garage didn’t have the original BackSpace.app on it, it did have a copy of the solitaire game that my friend and I worked on.
And that had an itty bitty SpiroScale screensaver embedded in the info panel!
Imagine that full screen — all dithered and textured in 2 bit grayscale. When color NeXT systems shipped a couple of years after I wrote the screensaver, I was quite delighted with the results (as seen below)!
Solitaire was an amusing little bit of indie development. Beyond having 4 different company logos in that about panel prior to finally signing with a distributor, the eventual distribution license was a flat monthly royalty for 25 months for Adam and I.
Flat royalties work out well when the company making the hardware your software runs on stops making said hardware….

Some months ago, I ported an ancient screensaver of mine to Mac OS X (then Leopard) and made the binary available.
I have since ported it to Snow Leopard and have made the source available via subversion. Pre-built binaries are also available.
There are actually two bits of source there; the first is which contains the Lizard Saver and a second screen saver called Spiro Scales. The screen savers should build for both Leopard and Snow Leopard, including support for Snow Leopard’s 64 bit GC-only screensaver requirement.
The second bit of source is called Screenalicious and is a simple/stupid application for displaying a screensaver in a window and allowing you to easily take scaled down screenshots. It was a hack when I originally wrote it in the ’90s sometime and it is still a hack.
SpiroScales was my first interactive screen saver. Interactive in that the pattern generated is entirely determined by mouse position (not movement).