Red Pill

OK, new screensaver early beta now available for download for a limited time only. Requires OS X 10.2, unfortunately.

The actual animation is by no means finalized; think of this as a demonstration of the sort of things the finished screensaver might do.

You might be wondering why on earth I’d want to make yet another screensaver inspired by That Movie. Well, I got some e-mail from someone who suggested it. I pointed out the various attempts already available, but he managed to convince me that they weren’t good enough, and that SnowSaver did a much better job than any of them at dealing with the “things drifting down the screen” part of the problem.

Of course, that still left the rest of the problem to deal with. There followed a great deal of frame-by-frame examination of movie footage and hand-drawing and optimizing of symbols. There was also the minor detail of writing just over 1,500 lines of Cocoa code, which includes a particle system, an OpenGL text library, and a couple of state machines… Generally speaking, the project has obeyed Hofstadter’s Law.