10.4: Show MacOSXHints on RSS screen saver

May 12, '05 09:43:00AM

Contributed by: Anonymous

Tiger only hintOr, for that matter, news from any RSS feed. This seems to work on any newsfeed, but here's an example of how to show MacOSXHints on your screensaver:

Change your screen saver to RSS Visualizer, in the Screen Saver tab of the Desktop & Screen Saver System Preferences panel. Now open terminal, go to ~/Library/Preferences/ByHost, and you'll find a file whose name starts with RSS Visualizer and ends with .plist. Convert the file into XML by using this command:

plutil -convert xml1 RSS Visualizer[press Tab to auto-complete]
Open the XML file in your favoriate editor, and locate this line:
<key>feedURL</key>
Under that tag, you'll find the URL of the RSS feed. Change the current entry to this:
http://www.macosxhints.com/backend/geeklog.rdf
Now save the file, and convert it back into binary plist format by using this command:
plutil -convert binary1 RSS Visualizer[press Tab to auto-complete]
Open your screensaver and there you go. One catch: The RSS screensaver doesn't seem to understand the 'feed' protocol, but changing that to 'http' seems to do the trick.

Comments (21)


Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20050503144058333