Matrix

Now featured on Awesome macOS Screensavers!

This is a Mac screensaver that I've been tinkering with since roughly 2002. I run it on all my personal machines, and have given copies to a few friends over the years, but hadn't made it publicly available for download.

After making some updates to it recently, I decided it was time.

Download the latest release here.

Unzip to Matrix.saver and double-click it to install, then go to System Preferences -> Desktop & Screen Saver and pick it from the list.

The "Renderer" popup switches betewen using OpenGL and Metal for rendering. The others are all pretty self-explanatory, although you might have to wait a bit to see what "Minor Instability" does. :)

Release notes:

Version 1.1.5

• Implemented a workaround for a bug in Apple's legacyScreenSaver process that causes increasing CPU and memory consumption every time the screensaver is invoked.
  • Note that this is a problem with all third-party screensavers, and it has been reported to Apple several times by different people over the past year or two, but it remains unfixed.
  • I got the idea from this workaround from a comment on a problem report on another screensaver. The screensaver plugin listens for a notification that the screensaver has been stopped, and calls exit(0) to terminate the process.
  • I've also added a checkbox to the screensaver's configuration pane that allows this workaround to be disabled if it causes problems in the future.

Version 1.1.4

• Fix for the black gap on the right edge on displays with a horizontal size that's not an even multiple of 4x the glyph width.

Version 1.1.3

• now built for both Intel and Apple Silicon

Version 1.1.2

• fixed zoom running backwards in OpenGL renderer
• changed some of the internals of how preferences are stored
• renderer selection is now a popup
• changed deployment target to include Mac OS X 10.11, and fixed some issues so it should now work on a 10.11 machine (the Metal renderer is disabled on 10.11 due to some issues there, so it's forced to OpenGL)

Version 1.1.1

• added thumbnail image for screensaver list
• fixed a graphical issue when the preview is moved between Retina and non-Retina displays

Version 1.1

• first public release