There are plenty of websites that offer accurate forecasts, and even Google can give you a quick-look at your location’s weather with a simple search query. Living Earth HD for Mac aims to keep you up-to-date on weather conditions without having to open your browser. Is it ready to replace your local weatherman?

Getting Started

Upon launching the app, you’ll be asked to input your current location. You can do this manually by typing your city’s name, or you can use the auto-location function to find your city. I opted for the latter, and found that it worked quickly and it correctly found where I was. You can also choose to add additional cities.

The location-finder worked quickly and accurately.

Interface

What makes Living Earth somewhat unique from competing apps is that is combines a menubar icon and drop-down with a full display of the planet’s weather on your desktop or as a screensaver. As a menubar app, you get the temperature (set in either Fahrenheit or Celsius) and an icon that summarizes your current conditions. These icons include sunny, sunny with clouds, rain, snow, haze, and a handful of others.

You get the temperature and an icon symbolizing current conditions.

Activating the menubar’s drop-down window reveals a wealth of information. At the top, you are shown a spinning globe with real-time cloud cover. The image looks fantastic, and the data it uses is very accurate. Next is your list of saved cities. Clicking on one of them centers the globe on that location and gives you more detailed weather information. You’ll get sunrise and sunset, humidity, wind, and a week’s worth of daily forecasts. Click on a given day and you can choose from three different charts that map the hourly temperature, humidity and wind.

Left: Living Earth shows you a weekly forecast. Right: Selecting a day gives you a more advanced look.

If you choose to use the wallpaper feature, your desktop shows a large view of your location, along with the time and current conditions. The graphics are sharp and the visuals are a beautiful option for your wallpaper.

Features

The simplest yet most welcome feature is the iCloud option that syncs your cities across multiple devices. The developers also have a universal iOS version of Living Earth that shares a similar interface. Frequent travelers who like to keep an updated list of cities available their Mac, iPhone and iPad will appreciate this feature, especially considering that it can double as a world clock.

The control panel gives you plenty of options for shortcuts, units, and syncing.

The settings pane for Living Earth offers a ton of customization options. You can set keyboard shortcuts that start the screensaver, add cities, and activate the menubar drop-down. You can choose from four wind speed units, including MPH, KPH, Meters per second, and Knots.

Power-users with multiple displays are given the option to display a mirrored image of the globe, your default background, or a plain black screen that matches the background behind the image of the earth. These options are available for both the desktop and screensaver.

The desktop view is a great alternative to static wallpapers.

The screensaver activation can be set to occur at various intervals between three minutes and two hours. You can choose to have the earth rotate on its axis, to randomly jump to various cities around the world, or to just jump between your saved cities. You also have a slider for these transitions, allowing the earth to either spin extremely fast or crawl along at a snails pace.

You get plenty of control over the screensaver options.

Perhaps the only major disappointment regarding Living Earth’s featureset stems from comparisons to the iOS version. On mobile devices, the app allows you to view the map with several different filters for various weather conditions, including humidity, min and max temperature, as well as the ability to find tropical storms and hurricanes with a single tap. The absence of those options on the Mac version stands as a glaring omission.

I was slightly concerned when I first started using the real-time desktop display that it would hog system resources. A quick glance at my Mac’s Activity Monitor relieved those worries.

The footprint on your system is minimal.

Comparison to Similar Apps

When it comes to weather apps on iOS and Mac, sometimes it feels like I’ve tried them all. None that I’ve used on any device has been perfect, as each struggles to balance a wealth of information in an easy-to-use interface. The app that Living Earth replaced for me was Clear Day, which has a similar functionality but places more emphasis on presenting advanced weather data.

Clear Day has some beautiful animations, but ultimately those began to feel trivial when compared with the real-time cloud cover that Living Earth shows. While Living Earth won me over with it’s visuals, I do wish it had a similar alert function as Clear Day. When a bad storm is approaching, Clear Day can send desktop alerts warning you and brings up National Weather Service advisories.

Conclusion

Taken individually, none of the features that Living Earth offers are particularly unique or innovative. But as a sum of its parts, the app performs enough roles to justify a spot on both your menubar and your desktop. At $7 dollars, it might feel like a cost that isn’t low enough to lure you away from one of the myriad of free options you have in your internet browser. While it lacks the robust data of elite weather apps like Seasonality Core, I think it offers enough of an upgrade from free options like Degrees to justify its cost.

However, I think potential users shouldn’t look at this as a menubar app that comes with a neat desktop display and screensaver. This is primarily a great-looking real-time desktop display and screensaver that adds an accurate, feature rich menubar weather forecast. Off all of the apps I use on a daily basis, Living Earth is undoubtedly responsible for the most rubbernecking from passersby.

Today we’ll look at how to set it up, what some of the various options are and our ultimate impressions regarding the software.

Setting Up

Once you download WebSaver, simply double click the screen saver file to install it. Then open up “Desktop and Screen Saver” inside System Preferences.

WebSaver Preference Pane

From here you can access all your screen savers and their respective settings, just make sure you have the “Screen Saver” tab selected, not the “Desktop” tab.

Under the “Other” heading on the far left, select the WebSaver screen saver. A preview should pop up in that little window of the screen saver with its default settings. Click on “Options” to customize these settings.

Adding Sites

After you click the settings button, you’ll be given the window below. Here you can add and remove sites, activate and deactivate sites, and set every site’s time interval.

Adding Sites to WebSaver

To add a new site to your screen saver, simply paste the URL into the field on the bottom of the window and hit the little plus button. Likewise, to remove a site, just select it from the list and hit the minus button.

The little checkboxes next to the list of sites allow you to turn sites on and off. This is a nice feature because you can keep a large list of sites handy without being forced to have them all activated at once.

To set the time interval of a given site, click the text under the “Duration” column on the right. You can choose from a number of option ranging from ten seconds to ten minutes.

Once you have some sites queued, click “Test” to see the screen saver in action. It should automatically load your pages and set the to a fullscreen view.

WebSaver Running visibletweets.com

Settings

Click on the “Settings” button at the top of the window to tweak the functionality of WebSaver. Here you can control the brightness at which sites display, disable processor taxing functions like JavaScript and Flash, enable caching for speedier site loading, activate speech (reads sites to you), and set the default font options.

WebSaver Settings

You can also set it so that when a Youtube or Vimeo video is called up, it will automatically display the fullscreen player. All of these settings seemed to function just fine. I especially like that you can control the font size and dim websites to be a bit easier on your screen and eyes.

Web List

Just in case you can’t think of any sites to include, the developers have created a list of suggestions. There are various categories to choose from for videos, magazines, etc. All you have to do is find a site that looks interesting and click the “add” button.

Suggested Sites

It’s really helpful that they’ve included some suggestions, but what I would’ve like to see here is something a little more automated. For instance, under the most popular Youtube videos, you can add specific Youtube videos to play every time the screen saver loads. However, it would be nice to be able to just tell WebSaver to load something random from Youtube’s current most popular list every time the screen saver starts.

Does It Work?

For the most part, WebSaver does exactly what the developer says it does. It’s a great idea and really opens up your choices for custom screen savers. Suddenly anything and everything you find on the web can become your new screensaver! I definitely enjoyed playing with the software and will continue to use it. If you’re always on the lookout for a cool new screen saver, I think WebSaver is well worth the $5.

The one thing that I couldn’t get to work was the auto-login feature. The developer claims that if you simply sign onto services like Facebook, Twitter and Gmail in Safari, you’ll be logged in for WebSaver as well. However, I simply didn’t find this to be true (maybe it doesn’t work with Safari 5?).

As a work around, I found that you can actually login straight from the screen saver. Just use your keyboard to tab to the appropriate field and type in your username and password. If you touch the mouse, the screen saver will quit but the keyboard doesn’t seem to have the same effect.

What’s Missing?

WebSaver is fairly basic at the moment but the developers promise that new features are on the way. Here’s my list of features that I feel should be added before the app can really feel nice and polished.

Transitions

Right now the sites abruptly change from one to the next. It would be nice to have a few options for fades and swipes to make the switch more attractive.

Auto-Scrolling

Unfortunately, you’re stuck looking at the top of whatever website you’re on. Implementing an adjustable auto-scroll would increase the functionality by allowing you to see the entire page.

RSS Integration

Currently, if you add an RSS feed to WebSaver, it will quit the screen saver and open the feed in Safari. Many RSS feeds are constantly updating and therefore feel like a perfect fit for WebSaver, especially if they were used in conjunction with the auto-scroll suggestion above!

List Reorder

You can either let the websites load in the order you entered them or set them to load in a random order. However, there’s no way to manually reorder your list without deleting and re-entering sites.

Allow Mouse Behavior

This one is arguable but I can see a need for allowing mouse behavior without killing the screen saver. There could be an optional setting that allows both keyboard and mouse input and will only deactivate the screen saver if you press the “esc” key. This would let you scroll, login easier, and interact with some sites if you want to. Granted, the idea of a screen saver is something that pops up when you’re not using the computer but I still think it’s a valid feature idea.

Get it Free!

You can currently download and use WebSaver for as long as you want without paying a cent, you’ll just be limited to four websites and the settings tab will be disabled.

You can also check out another completely free version here. This one limits you to one site at a time but can use your MacBook’s motion sensor to navigate the page (a really bizarre feature).

Conclusion

To sum up, WebSaver is an easy and extremely affordable way to display multiple websites and videos as a screen saver on your Mac. You can create and manage a list of sites and customize various settings such as font size and brightness.

WebSaver works fairly well but needs keychain integration to handle logins and could use a more robust feature set overall.

In this Quick Look, we’re highlighting WebSaver. The developer describes WebSaver quite simply as a screensaver that shows websites. You can create a screensaver with content of your own choice – any selection of websites that you regularly visit. It’s easy to customise, and really useful.

Read on for more information and screenshots!

Screenshots

Setting Up Your Website

Settings

About the App

Here are the top five features you can expect to see in the latest version:

• Individual on-screen time for every website
• Youtube and Vimeo movies are automatically played full screen
• Ability to disable plugins (like Flash…)
• Ability to disable Java & JavaScript
• Reductive layer – allows to change brightness of screensaver

Requirements: Mac OS X 10.6 or later & Intel Mac

Price: $5

Developer: Sandwichlab

Vote for a Review

Would you like to see us write a full review of WebSaver? Have your say in our poll:

Quick Look posts are paid submissions offering only a brief overview of an app. Vote in the poll if you think this app is worth an in-depth AppStorm review! If you’re a developer and would like to have your app profiled, you can submit it here.

Today we’re looking at 30 different screensavers that will inspire and inform you. Whether that’s keeping you up-to-date with news, showing information about incoming messages, recent tweets, or even helping you learn a new language!

ToDo List

ToDo List

This screensaver has all the features of a task list, in addition to displaying your tasks on your monitor. You can access your to-do list like any other application in order to update it. The full version of this screensaver is available for $9.95.

SaveHollywood

SaveHollywood

Play a QuickTime Movie as your screensaver. If you’d rather run videos in succession, you can select an entire directory.

Status Screen Saver

Status Screen Saver

One of the problems with screensavers is that if you’re expecting an email, you have to keep waking up your computer. With this screensaver, you can display the statuses of several different programs, such as email or instant messengers.

Dashsaver

Dashsaver

View your dashboard in your screensaver, displaying the weather or any RSS feeds you may want to get a quick look at.

Transparent

Transparent

Sometimes it’s important to use a screensaver that allows you to still see what’s actually happening on your desktop. This screensaver does just that. The full version is $15.

MoodSaver

MoodSaver

You can tell just how hard your computer is working by the brightness and movement of the colors in this screensaver.

ShuffleSaver

ShuffleSaver

Watch photos from Flickr cross your screen. You can even mark photos as favorite or skip pictures using hot keys.

BigSpy

BigSpy

Display the latest activity on Digg as your screensaver. You’ll see new headlines, and as they get more diggs, they’ll get bigger.

Stack

Stack

With this screensaver, you can see a visualization of the number of votes new headlines are receiving on Digg.

Swarm

Swarm

Another visualization of Digg votes, this screensaver shows the progression of how specific Digg users are voting up different stories.

TweetSavr

TweetSavr

Show the tweets of any particular user as your screensaver.

Twistori

A colorful display of Twitter posts, this screensaver displays posts that include specific verbs, such as ‘love’ or ‘hate.’

Twistori

LibraryThing

LibraryThing

For LibraryThing users, you can display the covers of the books in your collection as your screensaver.

Sprint, This is Now

Sprint, This is Now

This screensaver developed by Sprint allows you to pull in all of your social media presence and see updates to Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and more while your screensaver is active.

Word Clock

Word Clock

This screensaver shows a creative clock while running, by highlighting the words that make up the current time.

Dropclock

Dropclock

Watch the numbers that make up the current time slowly drop into water for a clock with an unusual effect.

Polar Clock

Polar Clock

The time progresses on this screensaver, with each part of the exact time — from seconds to month — circling around the center of the screen, changing colors in the process.

Time Zones

Time Zones

See the time in randomly selected time zones all over the world.

Mars 3D Space Survey

Mars 3D Space Survey

Explore Mars as your screensaver runs — you can see a variety of views of the planet, as well as its moons, Phobos and Deimos.

Impressionists Art Slide Show

Impressionists Art Slide Show

Familiarize yourself with famous Impressionist paintings with this screensaver. The full version is available for $9.95.

Great Art Through the Ages

Great Art Through the Ages

View a gallery of great art on your computer monitor while this screensaver runs. The full version is available for $9.95.

Structure

Structure

Render files from the Protein Data Bank as your screensaver and see proteins and macromolecules develop on your screen.

Cavendish Screensaver

Cavendish Screensaver

Create your own universe with this screensaver and watch the evolution of the system due to gravity.

Italian Vocabulary Screensaver

Italian Vocabulary

Need to improve your Italian language skills? This screensaver can help you with your vocabulary.

Spanish Flash Cards

Spanish Flash Cards

Learn Spanish with these flash cards that double as a screensaver. 

Album Art for the Rest of Us

Album Art For the Rest of Us

Randomly display album art from your iTunes with this screensaver, which allows you to see what music you have available in a new way.

MacHouse Quotes

MacHouse Quotes

This screensaver offers inspirational quotes from famous folks.

60gilvy

60gilvy

If you have an interest in marketing, this screensaver shares advice from marketing legend David Ogilvy.

AlphaBaby

AlphaBaby

If you have small children, this screensaver provides a way for them to type on your keyboard without causing any problems.

RSS Visualizer

RSS Visualizer

Even though it comes with Mac OS X, this screensaver is one of the most informative out there. It displays headlines from any RSS feed you plug in.

Conclusion

Hopefully one or two of these will appeal to you, and help keep you informed about the latest happenings in the world (or just inspired with classic artwork!)

Feel free to share your own favourites in the comments – I’d be interested to find a few more examples of data-driven screensavers!

We’ve scoured the internet to find 34 stunning screensavers for OS X, each with something unique to offer. There’s something for everyone – from calm and serene, to abstract and wacky. Dive in and have fun picking out a new screensaver!

Free OS X Screensavers

MovingPhotos 3D

MovingPhotos 3D

This saver arranges your photos to form 3D constructions, such as a city block with buildings.

Analogy

Analogy Screensaver

Analogy is a typographic clock which fuses the immediacy of digital with the visual-spatial quality of analogue into a hybrid format.

Time Machine Screensaver

Time Machine

A time machine-like animation that loads as a screensaver. Choose between normal or RSS version.

HAL 9000

HAL Screensaver

John Gruber: Gorgeous homage to HAL by Joe Mackenzie. I haven’t used a screensaver on my computer in at least 10 years, but I’m running one now.

Euphoria

Euphoria Screensaver

A port of the Windows OpenGL ScreenSaver made by Terence M. Welsh, full of abstract colors and shapes.

Econ

Econ Screensaver

The screensaver that uses your icons, flying through them in high quality icon bliss. It automatically gathers them from your /Applications folder.

Fenêtres Volantes

Fenêtres Volantes Screensaver

Taking your open applications and catapulting them around the screen in a really great effect.

Plasma Tunnel

Plasma Tunnel Screensaver

A swirling vortex of screensaver delight.

Red Baron

Red Baron Screensaver

Fly behind a classic bi-plane as it soars across idyllic scenery.

Hyperspace

HyperSpace Screensaver

Hyperspace is a screen saver that sends its users on a virtual trip through a wormhole, just like the ones in some sci-fi TV shows and movies.

Digg Stack

Digg Stack

Digg Stack shows diggs occurring in real time on up to 100 stories at once. Diggers fall from above and stack up on popular stories. Brightly colored stories have more Diggs.

Shuffle Saver

ShuffleSaver

Loads your favorite photos from flickr.com or iPhoto and shuffles them. You get new photos everytime the screensaver starts.

Alien Sun Clock

Alien Sun Clock Screensaver

Alien Sun Clock Screensaver lets you look at the usual things in a surprisingly new way with a warm, radiant clock.

Solar Winds

Solar Winds

This is a very mesmerizing particle effects saver. Tweak the settings a little and you’ll find that you can achieve an amazing number of different patterns.

Lotsa Water

LotsaWater Screensaver

This screensaver renders a fairly realistic water effect over your desktop, showing it distorted through the wavy surface of the water as raindrops fall on the surface.

Digg Arc

Digg Arc Screensaver

Digg Arc displays stories, topics, and containers wrapped around a sphere. Arcs trail people as they Digg stories across topics. Stories with more Diggs make thicker arcs.

AlphaBaby

AlphaBaby Screensaver

A great screensaver for kids, displaying letters, numbers, shapes and sounds as you interact with the mouse and keyboard.

National Geographic

National Geographic Screensaver

National Geographic, the standard bearer for quality images delivers with this screensaver. A spectacular slideshow of pictures from around the world.

Artecnica Clock

Artecnica Clock

A funky timepiece with a variety of different number styles and graphics.

Dashsaver

Dashsaver

When the computer is inactive after the specified time as set in the Screen Saver preference pane, the dashboard is displayed and the users’ desktop is hidden

Flux

Flux Screensaver

Dancing, pulsing, colorful and beautiful.

Holding Pattern Coach Class

Holding Pattern Coach Class

Free version with 15 aerial views – a great way to try out screen saver cinema.

SoundStream

SoundStream Screensaver

Soundstream is a Mac OS X screensaver that responds to sound input. Colorful Flurry-like streams pulse to the beat of music or bloom with ambient noise.

ScriptSaver

ScriptSaver

ScriptSaver is a Mac OS X screensaver which runs AppleScripts when it activates and deactivates. Great for performing maintenance, or updating iChat status when the computer is idle.

Save Hollywood

Save Hollywood

This screensaver allows you to display QuickTime Movies as a screensaver. Useful for taking a little time out.

Fireflies

Fireflies Screensaver

Possible a little more dramatic than a real-life firefly, but still cool.

Matrix Reloaded

Matrix Reloaded Screensaver

No one can claim that they don’t feel a little bit cool with a Matrix screensaver. Go on – try it out…

Skyrocket

SkyRocket Screensaver

A gorgeous firework screensaver, rending in 3D with realistic graphics and sound.

Under The Sea 3D

Imax Under The Sea

A delightful, high quality, look at life under the sea. Typical IMAX delight!

LotsaEscher

Lotsa Escher Screesaver

This is a screensaver which displays an animated version of M.C. Escher’s Print Gallery drawing. Great for art fans!

Snowfall

Snowfall Screensaver

We’re still a long way off Christmas, but it’s worth downloading to have handy when December comes around…

Surveillance Saver

Surveillance Saver

SurveillanceSaver is a simple screen saver that displays more than 1000 surveillance cameras worldwide.

Helios

Helios Screensaver

Helios is a particle attraction/repulsion screen saver where “blobs” emit and receive multi-colored particles. It’s difficult to describe, but as some have said about the screen saver, it’s pretty insane.

Presstube

Presstube Screensaver

Fast paced and unusual, with a random array of sketches and drawings being quickly drafted on your screen.

Please Share!

If you’re the proud owner of a great screensaver not featured here, don’t keep it to yourself! Please let us know in the comments – I’m always on the look out for new ways to keep my monitor happy…