Back in the "classic" days of Mac OS, one of the most iconic and beloved screensavers was the Flying Toasters. Originally developed by Berkeley Systems and released in the early 1990s as part of the After Dark screensaver collection. Later versions featured animations, and music. Personally speaking, this has always been one of my absolute favorite screensavers so I did something totally off-the-cuff, I recreated it in for modern macOS.

My idea wasn't to make a 1:1 recreation but a spiritual successor that captures the essence of the original while taking advantage of modern hardware for effects like z-depth and particle generated clouds. The end result is a delightfully retro screensaver that let's users control the experience.

Development Challenges

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Developing a ScreenSaver in modern macOS is tedious, mostly due to the fact Apple in it's infinite wisdom caches the screensaver in a system process which seems to be largely undocumented. This meant hours wondering why my changes weren't taking only to discover. I needed to force quit several tasks. This resulted in an sh script that looked like the following:

# Kill the legacyScreenSaver process to force refresh
echo "🔄 Killing legacyScreenSaver process..."
pkill -f "legacyScreenSaver" 2>/dev/null || echo "   (process not running)"

# Kill any wallpaper engine processes that might cache screensavers
echo "🔄 Killing Wallpaper Engine processes..."
pkill -f "WallpaperAgent" 2>/dev/null || echo "   (WallpaperAgent not running)"
pkill -f "ScreenSaverEngine" 2>/dev/null || echo "   (ScreenSaverEngine not running)"

A Retro Port

Part of the silliness of recreating the old screen saver was creating a back port for older OS X, particularly for OS X 10.4 and 10.5. This wasn't nearly as tedious as I expected. I scaled back the screensaver removing the particle generated clouds as they were heavy even on modern hardware for pure CPU. Getting v0.1 build was easy. Creating the v0.2 that supports OpenGL was much less so due to the antiquated graphics API. After a lot of brute forcing, and smashing my head against the wall, I managed to get OpenGL 2.0 running properly for OpenGL 2.0 supported Macs.

Download Links

The downloads exist on my patreon, but they are free-to-all, and you don't need to sign up. Free tier members will get access to the latest updates and versions if you subscribe.

Official Website: Ode to the Flying Toaster