Offshoots is a fun little visual app that grows trees on your Mac. It comes in screensaver and app form–the app runs as your Desktop background. Essentially one vector “branch” appears on screen, and a bunch of offshoots from it appear (as well as leaves), making it a full tree. You can even set Offshoots to grow toward your mouse, and set all of its colors, sizes, and alpha levels yourself.

Rating: 4.5/5. A little slow at times, but still very cool.

Developer site:
Projects.DigitalWaters.net/Index..php?Q=Offshoots

Caffeine is a useful, minimalist tool that sits in your menu bar, and lets you control whether or not your Mac goes to sleep, and when it should. It’s extremely simplistic (one click of its icon will keep your Mac from sleeping). You can set it to not sleep for certain time cycles, as well. Very useful.

Rating: 5/5. Does what it does, works great. Nice icon, too.

Developer site: LightHeadSW.com/Caffeine

LotsaWater is an awesome screensaver app that makes it look like your Mac’s desktop is underwater. You can adjust the amount of rain falling on the water. The rain isn’t animated, only the ripples in the water. Still great though, and definitely worth trying. You’ll be amazed!

Rating: 5/5. My other favorite screensaver (next to ElectricSheep).

Developer site: Wakaba.C3.cx/S/LotsaBlankers/LotsaWater.html

In honor of New Year’s Day, I’ve decided to post a rather festive screensaver. SkyRocket is a popular screensaver that shoots fireworks into the virtual sky. It has tons of options and allows for many fireworks (or just a few) to go off. Really cool screensaver.

Rating: 4.5/5. Great fireworks, but the ground texture could use some work.

Developer site: Seiryu.Home.Comcast.net/~Seiryu

Folding@Home is a productive app that lets you “donate your computer time” to scientific research. You can set it to run as a screensaver, or just have it run in the background. You can also track your progress online.

What this application really does is give you an example of a cell of a disease, and your computer (along with millions of others) analyzes it to help figure out how to cure it. In a sense, computers around the nation are put together to make a global supercomputer.

Rating: 4.5/5. Great idea, but Mac version feels like a port.

Developer site: Folding.Stanford.edu

ElectricSheep is the greatest screensaver ever. It uses “flame fractals” which are patterns that are randomly generated from lines of code. It makes absolutely amazing patterns, but takes up a lot of space on your hard drive (up to 9GB depending on which megapacks you download), depending on how many fractal videos you download. This is the kind of screensaver that you show your friends (and brag about)! Also, while it runs, it downloads new sheep files for you. Very, very cool.

Rating: 5/5. Really, really awesome.

Developer site: ElectricSheep.org
You’ll also probably want to download some megapacks of pre-made fractals (otherwise the screensaver tries to download too many from torrents, and goes way too slow): SheepServer.DreamHosters.com/Megapacks.

Acknowledgements: Thanks to Miles for reminding me of a very important feature.

Fenetres Volantes (Floating Windows) is an absolutely amazing screensaver. When it’s activated, it pulls your desktop backwards a ways, and all of your open windows start to float around. They flip and turn, and move around like they really are floating. Very cool.

Rating: 5/5. One of my favorite screensavers of all time.

Developer site: Objective-Cocoa.com/FenetresVolantes