How to create a screensaver?

Question

Which is the best programming language to use for creating a screensaver?

I am thinking of creating a screensaver to showcase projects i have done before for self satisfaction.

How should i go about it?

Thanks

Answer 1

If you are on Mac OS X, probably the best is to use the visual programming of Quartz Composer, which comes with the Dev tools.

Answer 2

I read in a site that it's good to use DirectX or OpenGL (Therfor C++ is a good choice). The graphical powers that they offer are perfect for this. ofcourse DirectX is harder to learn than OpenGL but that's just my point of view. And there's some info here: http://www.programmingforums.org/thread22254.html

[Edit]: The cool thing I learned from that link is that in windows a screensaver is really an exe whose extension has been renamed to "scr". Oh, and Noufal's right

It would highly depend on the platform and other such details.

but I just assumed you meant windows.

Answer 3

It would highly depend on the platform and other such details.

For Gnu/Linux systems (or perhaps I should say X based systems), JWZ's xscreensaver project would do the trick. It has a main daemon that will do the keyboard and other such work for you. You just have to give it a program that can write to the root X window.

I'm not familiar enough with Windows to offer suggestions there. The basic idea is that you'll need to intercept keyboard input and have a window that covers the entire screen which can't be closed or minimised. I imagine most languages can do this with the standard APIs exposed by the OS.