One of the more under-appreciated touches in the past few MacOS versions in my opinion has been the series of themed abstract screen savers that started with Monterrey and has been added to with each new major release.
Because I am an absolutely massive nerd, I started noticing that the Sonoma screen saver has a much more noticeable loop than the previous two. I think all of them have a defined loop – see this exploration of the resources in monterrey.saver that includes a camera paths.abc – but Sonoma's seemed shorter.
I started wondering: Could this be a video? After all, they brought a boatload of other video screen savers to Sonoma; why not this too? Looking closely for artifacts (yes, this is how I procrastinate) I couldn't make out any obvious macro-blocking, but I could just about see that telltale color fringing between certain areas of green and pink... though maybe this was just post-processing? The screen saver does seem to run at slightly lower resolution on my 27" monitor than the previous two, which would also suggest video, but then again, they could just be limiting rendering resolution for performance.
This should be easy enough to resolve just by looking at the file itself and seeing if it's way bigger than the previous two, but the files appear to have moved somewhere hidden!
Assuming I'm not the only person in the world curious to know the answer to this question (which might be assuming a lot), anyone else have any ideas?
Because I am an absolutely massive nerd, I started noticing that the Sonoma screen saver has a much more noticeable loop than the previous two. I think all of them have a defined loop – see this exploration of the resources in monterrey.saver that includes a camera paths.abc – but Sonoma's seemed shorter.
I started wondering: Could this be a video? After all, they brought a boatload of other video screen savers to Sonoma; why not this too? Looking closely for artifacts (yes, this is how I procrastinate) I couldn't make out any obvious macro-blocking, but I could just about see that telltale color fringing between certain areas of green and pink... though maybe this was just post-processing? The screen saver does seem to run at slightly lower resolution on my 27" monitor than the previous two, which would also suggest video, but then again, they could just be limiting rendering resolution for performance.
This should be easy enough to resolve just by looking at the file itself and seeing if it's way bigger than the previous two, but the files appear to have moved somewhere hidden!
Assuming I'm not the only person in the world curious to know the answer to this question (which might be assuming a lot), anyone else have any ideas?
