As I'm getting my desktop decorated for Christmas, I'm playing with a few small programs that cause snow to fall on my screen. But there is one that I really liked from the OS 9 days. I don't remember the name, but there were some cool things it did that the OS X snow simulations do not. For one thing, in the preferences you could choose to make the flakes look like little cookie-cutter designs (which is what the OS X snow apps do), but you could also make the snow look like tiny white dots, which actually seemed more realistic than intricate six-pointed patterns. There was also a control for wind velocity, so that you could make the flakes fall gently or blow around a lot. And this application came with about two dozen Christmas tunes, including music from "A Charlie Brown Christmas".
Damn, that was a cool little app. I wish I could remember the name, and I wish there'd been an OS X version of it.
Another freeware program some of you will remember fondly is Smashing Windows -- which was really Space Invaders, but you got to blow up Windows logos instead of little spaceships.
As far as professional apps, there was a 3D titling program called Specular LogoMotion. It was really cheap ($79, as I remember), and it could do 3D text with surfaces, reflections, etc. Cheaper and easier than Boris or Lightwave. That program not only never got ported to OS X, but I think the company went out of business.
Damn, that was a cool little app. I wish I could remember the name, and I wish there'd been an OS X version of it.
Another freeware program some of you will remember fondly is Smashing Windows -- which was really Space Invaders, but you got to blow up Windows logos instead of little spaceships.
As far as professional apps, there was a 3D titling program called Specular LogoMotion. It was really cheap ($79, as I remember), and it could do 3D text with surfaces, reflections, etc. Cheaper and easier than Boris or Lightwave. That program not only never got ported to OS X, but I think the company went out of business.
It works under Classic, but you need to enable "use backdrop" and it only snows when it's in the foreground (but if you use the sleep thing it can still work as sort of a fake screen saver)
