Facebook Screen Saver
Facebook’s new public API has brought forth a lot of creative effort from external developers, but there haven’t been many desktop applications released to take advantage of its power.
So I thought, what better way to do something fun with the platform than write a MacOS screen saver?
Friend Photos finds pictures of your facebook friends and turns them into a dynamic slideshow.
It makes use of Quartz Composer in much the same way as the Apple TV’s famed screen saver, passing a data structure full of photos and metadata gleaned from facebook into a QC patch and moving them around for dramatic effect.
Let me know if you have any issues, clever presentation ideas, or what have you.
Update:
I’ve written about the creation of this screen saver, along with the early days of the Facebook API, and Facebook’s own embrace of Quartz Composer over here, if you’re interested.
September 29th, 2010 at 7:06 pm
Hey Mark
Any news on if you will be able to sort out the facebook external login issues? I’ve been looking for a screensaver to stream from facebook or flickr for ages and just happened to stumble across yours.
The previews on youtube look awesome!
Cheers
January 29th, 2008 at 4:04 am
Could you make a MySpace Screensaver?
November 20th, 2007 at 7:34 am
i want to inform me with a web that i can by it log in to facebook.com because it is blocked from here from my country so please could you feed me back with the web regards…
October 3rd, 2007 at 9:04 pm
Facebook changed their external login arrangement, so the screensaver doesn’t appear to work anymore. Looking forward to an update.
September 24th, 2007 at 9:23 pm
[…] This morning, via the Macalope, I found the Facebook Friends screensaver for Mac OS X. You can set it so that it displays random photos, random albums, or (my choice) current profile pictures of all or some of your friends on Facebook […]
June 21st, 2007 at 8:48 pm
[…] crazy cat over at Doomlaser has created a screensaver for OSX that displays photos from your various friends’ Facebook […]