I just noticed that Mac OS X has a RSS feed screensaver that shows headlines in spiraling columns. When you see an item you want to read you press a key and it opens the item. It is an interesting example of live text visualization. You can see it on YouTube – RSS Feed on my Screen saver.
The RSS Screensaver seems to be built in a visual programming language for the Mac called Quartz Composer. From the documentation and discussions online it sounds like something one can play with easily (when I have the time.)
What would an academic screen saver look like?
Quartz Composer has been around for a while (it’s a bit like the old Silicon Graphics Irix Explorer, one of the first visual pipes development kits), and the RSS screensaver was developed in 2006 (I think) by whom I don’t know but I had it showing BBC Wordl News when I first tried it.
Composer was first conceived as a graphics toolkit to show off the Quartz rendering engine and, later, Core Image library, but it can do a lot of what Yahoo Pipes does, like taking a network data feed as a base input, even a google search set, and that makes it pretty interesting even without using the graphics filters and so on.
My current screensaver is built on the same principle as the RSS viewer but starts with a google search set on a string that finds dynamic jpeg directories on networked security cameras and displays the video feed in random rotation. My friend Randall sent me the URL http://i.document.m05.de/?p=418.