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If there's one software category that's as crowded as a football team in a phone booth, it's screensavers and wallpapers. To gain some visibility in that mob, an application has to offer something special. My Living Desktop (US$34.95), from Amuse, has that kind of distinction.
The program creates a desktop environment mixing dissolving videos with sound. In its latest version released earlier this month, it includes more than 40 video clips, but users can add their own clips to the program's library, as well.
"The idea is to bring your desktop to life," Amuse Founder Kevin Kachikian told MacNewsWorld.
"It's really a new class of software for the Mac- -- moving wallpaper," he added.
Liberating Cube Rats
When he launched the software in 2004, Kachikian's goal was to provide keyboard jocks and cube rats with a serene reminder of life beyond their monitors.
"I wanted to reconnect people with nature, to remind them that there was all this beauty right outside their window," he explained.
The application contains video scenes from around the world from California to Scotland to Thailand. Subjects include flowers, trees, oceans, beaches, underwater reefs, birds, rain, waterfalls and mountains.
Scenes can be rated by a user on a scale of one to five. The higher the rating, the more frequently the scene will appear on the desktop. Scenes can be turned off entirely, too.
'Serenity Break'
The ability to add scenes to the software's library is a new feature in this release of the program, version 4.5. "People can go out and shoot their kids playing soccer or their backyard or their vacation and play them on the desktop and as a screensaver," Kachikian said.
Another new feature of the application is the "Serenity Break." It will remind a user, at times set by him or her, to walk away from the keyboard for some "me time." "When the break kicks in, it takes all your work that you're doing on the desktop and fades it into the background," Kachikian noted. "Then it will take your scenes and fade them into the foreground."
"We wanted to make it configurable and easy to use for the end user as much as possible without giving them too much control," he added. "You can give people way too much control, and it confuses them."
Amuse describes My Living Desktop as "software with impeccable manners." That's because it knows when silence is golden and when it's not. So if a user starts listening to music on their Mac, the software will mute its sound and not interfere with his or her listening pleasure. When the music app is shut down, My Living Desktop will amp up its sound again. What's more, the software can be programmed to be silent for applications chosen by the user.
Automatic Throttling
One problem with video applications is they can suck up processing power and, on notebooks, reduce battery life. That was taken into account in My Living Desktop's design, Kachikian explained.
"I wanted to make it so it doesn't bog down the computer while it's playing video," he said. "It would be pointless if you couldn't do your main work while it was playing."
Intelligence is built into the application, he said, to enable it to monitor foreground tasks and throttle back its processor demands as needed.
"Not only that," he added, "but these videos are QuickTime movies, and QuickTime has a lot of auto-throttling features built into it to slow itself down as needed."
Video Packs in the Wings?
In practice, though, that usually only happens when intensive computational tasks are being performed, like 3-D graphics rendering and video compression, he maintained.
In a pinch, the program can be toggled off or on or its sound muted or unmuted through a control on a Mac's menu bar.
In addition to its single user price of $34.95, Amuse sells five-machine licenses for $49.95 and site licenses for $99.95.
Up to now, Kachikian has avoided creating ancillary products for My Living Desktop, but he may not be able to resist that much longer, especially when it comes to creating additional video packs for the software. "I've had so many customers asking about that I'm headed in that direction," he confessed.
