The guys over at Uneasy Silence recently linked to the Floating Photos screensaver ripped off the Apple TV disk image, and asked if anyone was up to the task of getting it running on 10.4 machines.

I’ve been tinkering with the original file they linked, which essentially presented 3 objects (Near, Middle, Far) that rotated periodically. I’ve patched them into the slideshow composition, so they display a fading-sequence of images, then tiled them into a 3×3×3 cube. It’s a cool effect, although there are three main issues:

• the range of motion does not match the screen dimensions (so you see the objects die/regenerate), and layering is manual (so it’s not perfect).

• all the objects are the same - presumably Core Animation is going to make this easier to deal with. Although I didn’t use the Particle Generator, it has a limitation that all generated objects will be identical. If someone can figure out how to iteratively generate objects, then we can get closer to the desired effect.

• loading images is very rudimentary & somewhat buggy (source folder is published so can be set in Screensaver Options and is recursive - it will find images in sub folders)

You can see a preview vid in my portfolio. If anyone has further experience with Quartz Composer and knows how to take this further, I would really love to hear from you. In the meantime, enjoy the work in progress:

FloatingPhotos.qtz.zip