The RSS Visualizer Screen Saver in Mac OS X 10.4/10.5 is a pretty nifty one… However, in my opinion (and in that of so many others !), it still lacks some functionality – especially being able to specify multiple feeds from which to grab news items… After having searched around on the web for something that would do, I finally bit the bullet and opened up Quartz Composer. The result ? MultiRSS Visualizer…
Ok… so once I opened up the stock RSS Visualizer in Quartz Composer, some playing around was all that it took to understand the basics of how it operates. The great thing about Quartz Composer is that you can pretty much do everything by simply interconnecting blocks. Anyone with even a little bit of programming background shouldnt have any problem understanding how QC works. Being both an EE and Computer Science engineer, it was pretty easy to look at it from the perspective of digital circuit design – putting together blocks, interconnecting them with signals carrying data ! So much for my thoughts.. on to the actual process..
The only needed addition to the stock RSS visualizer is the ability to change URLs periodically. That and a bit more work to add a randomization element. The first was solved by parsing a comma separated list of URLs to produce a list, and then stepping through that list one at a time (with a time interval equal to NumNewsItems * Time to display one news item) – and passing each URL to the existing processing blocks.
It took a little bit more time to implement the randomization – using which you can select a different feed to start the screensaver each time. An initial solution was to use the Random patch – but it took one run for me to realize that because this was a pseudo random generator – with no way to specify a starting seed – this approach would never work ! The solution ? Add in a system time patch which can then be used to really generate a random starting index for the feeds.
That was it.. You can open up the screen saver in QC and look at it in more detail. Enjoy !
The screenshot below shows the preferences panel for the screensaver. The RSS feeds to be displayed by the screensaver are configured as a comma separated list in the field RSSURLList seen below.
Screenshot of the System preferences pane for MultiRSS Visualizer
- Title: multirss-visualizer-v2
Caption: MultiRSS Visualizer RSS Screensaver (Right click on this file and download it to your Mac. Save it in /Users/_your_username_/Library/Screen Savers/ (create that folder if it doesnt exist). Then open up the Desktop and Screensaver preference pane and select this screensaver.)
File: multirss-visualizer-v2.qtz
Size: 236 kB
HI, I was using your multi rss and i must say good job, but i am having an issue with the ability to press a number to retrieve the actual news article. if you have any solution please let me know and thankyou for your time.
-Joshua
Joshua,
Per my understanding, unfortunately, this is a limitation of Mac OS X… Earlier versions had the ability to do this, but the newer ones (Leopard, Tiger) seem to have done away with it… I’ll keep posting here if I figure out a workaround though..
–Devarshi
I think this is great and have been using it for some time. I have been trying to figure out how to get the time to reflect the local timezone settings (It is always Pacific time) but am not strong enough at Quartz Composer. Any ideas how I could make that happen?
It’s Easy.
Subscribe to the multiple news feeds in google reader. Add the news feeds into a folder in google reader, and click the ‘more details’ for that folder. You will be able to find a combined RSS feed
This is so great! Thanks for making the RSS headline screensaver a lot less boring!
@Andrew, Well, I originally developed this back in early ‘05, when Google Reader was not around…
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Devarshi.
Thanks so much for this. Really nice.
Q: What is the variable to affect whether or not the column of text appears up close between items? My preference would be to see [item], fades out, [item 2, etc]
Q2: Does this really let you view more than 10 entries? Perhaps I did something wrong, but haven’t been able to achieve that. [moved Newscount to 100]
Many thanks!
I can’t seem to get it to remember RSS URLs in the Options plane. It keeps reverting back to the three or so that are there by default.
Andrew I don’t see a “more details” option but a “view details ” option when I click the folder which gives me a URL, however if I paste that URL into the default RSS viewer it does not work. ??
Love the product, thanks for your efforts.
I like one of the other commenters cannot get the options to accept my desired feeds, I enter them but when I click done it reverts back to the default feeds.
Any ideas ?
Thanks DJB
So, apparently, there has been a bug in OS X screen saver preference panes… You need to edit that field, then hit Tab to go to another field an then click OK for the preferences to take effect.. I filed a report with Apple a long time back, but haven’t seen any changes yet!
@Deric: Open the Patch Inspector for System Time -> Date Formatter and uncheck the Custom Time Zone box under Settings.