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10.4: Show MacOSXHints on RSS screen saver
Authored by: rgould on May 12, '05 05:31:34PM
jcroft & zane,

you two dont get it either. maybe because you arent creative. how about this scenario:

you are ESPN. you want to use the quartz composer to designing a cool screensaver to handle ONLY your RSS feed. sadly, when you do create a screensaver using quartz composer, it defaults to the same behavior that the one apple ships with tiger has. so then you have to explain to your readers that they need to open safari, bookmark the RSS, and blah blah blah. lots of steps. and that leaves the screen saver open to manipulation with the "options..." button that you are all fond of pointing out.

this hint would let someone create a unique RSS screensaver that an end user cant mess with. unless they hack it with this hint, that is.

thats what "be creative" meant.

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10.4: Show MacOSXHints on RSS screen saver
Authored by: jcroft on May 12, '05 05:49:10PM

I am not creative? I'm a graphic and web designer by trade, and a pretty well respected one, at that.

My point was not that you are incorrect. My point was that while everytthing you are saying is true, there is no good reason why anyone should have thought of that sort of application based on the hint. The hint tells us how to change our RSS screensaver to use a user-specificed RSS feed. It doesn't say anything about creating a screensaver based on the RSS one. You came up with that -- it's totally irrelevant to this hint.

The hint is poorly worded, plain and simple. It tells us how to do something the hard way. That's not a "hint," but rather a timesink.



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10.4: Show MacOSXHints on RSS screen saver
Authored by: Ockham on May 12, '05 07:02:27PM
"this hint would let someone create a unique RSS screensaver that an end user cant mess with. unless they hack it with this hint, that is. "

Actually, that's not true. The options button will still let you modify the preferred RSS feed after you have manipulated the .plist as described in this hint. Why? Because this hint is merely modifying the preferred RSS feed by typing it in the long way directly in the .plist file instead of choosing it from the option button.

And to be clear, this has nothing to do with creativity, just simplicity. Had the hint actually been about using Quartz Composer to create a new RSS feed screen saver that is site-specific or is unique in some other way (like making the feed all lower case) that would be creative.

This hint did not discuss anything to do with Quartz Composer. This hint discussed taking the long road and manually changing the .plist file instead of simply doing it via the preference pane.

That being said, I applaud the hint poster for taking the initiative and figuring out how it all works.

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10.4: Show MacOSXHints on RSS screen saver
Authored by: mrpresident47 on May 12, '05 07:50:57PM
LOUD NOISES!!!!!!!!!

(See the movie Anchorman)

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10.4: Show MacOSXHints on RSS screen saver
Authored by: dubmaster on May 13, '05 01:02:30PM

That is actually not true, because you can define the url for the feed in the quarz composer already. Just select the first box RSS Feed box in the Root patch layout and do an Apple-I. Cycle to (or choose from the pulldown menu) Input Parameters and enter your RSS Feeds URL. Once you modified all what you want, color, speed, whatever, and you save it, it will keep the url.
You as well could copy the original RSS Visualizer (it's in /System/Library/Screensaver) to your Users /Library/Screensavers Folder and double click it there. Quartz composer will open and you can modify about all the settings with help of the Inspector panel.

---
-- Dub



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