Life & fun · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to An homage to Tom Dowdy's 1991 screensaver, "Kaos"
So, I was about 11 years old and just got my first Mac, a IIsi, and of course everyone had AfterDark, but there was this other screensaver program called "Dark Side of the Mac". And within it was, I think now, the most beautiful screensaver ever written. It was called Kaos. Kaos would take anywhere from 10 to 30 seconds to slowly iterate on a single image, starting with a few colored dots and growing into webs within webs of algorithmic beauty. I'm not sure how Tom Dowdy actually wrote the program. What I've done here is to try to reverse engineer how it might have worked, but to animate it…
This is an animated recreation of Tom Dowdy's 1991 "Kaos" screensaver, which creates intricate webs of algorithmic patterns from simple colored dots. The creator reverse-engineered the original program and added… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
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2016 · primitive.lol · its alternatives →
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"After Dark" by Berkeley Systems was a collection of screensavers for Macintosh and Windows from early 90s; "Flying Toasters" is probably the most famous and loved among them. Using my very limited knowledge of C and X11 programming, I recreated it as a XScreensaver module for Linux. Hope you find it useful or at least amusing!
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Turn your screen into an inspiring mood board
2015 · getfleck.com · its alternatives →
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Hargun's MacOS▲132A fully interactive, Mac-like experience directly in browser
Nov 2025 · hargunpreet.vercel.app · its alternatives →
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Screensavers for your terminal. Contribute to cxreiff/ttysvr development by creating an account on GitHub.
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Display websites through your screensaver
2015 · expireddomains.com · its alternatives →
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Hi, I've been working on something I've been thinking for long time but since I had no experience with macOS screen savers I always posponed. Now thanks to Claude I was able to create a screensaver that scroll ANSI files while your computer is idle. It allow to use local ANS files or packs directly from 16colo.rs. Repo: https://github.com/lardissone/ansi-saver
Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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MacOS screensaver that displays the time using 24 clocks
2022 · amiantos.s3.amazonaws.com · its alternatives →
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After 25 years of writing software, I was feeling nostalgic for the kinds of things that got me into programming in the first place: the old DOS demoscene. I spent a weekend seeing if I could recapture some of that INT 13H VGA magic using today's web tech, but with the old-school constraints of doing it from scratch. The result is this portfolio of ten classic effects running in a single HTML file. It's all vanilla JavaScript writing to a element, with no external libraries. It was a fun challenge to implement things like: * The color palette cycling and smooth fading in the Plasma demo. *…
2025 · jdfio.com · its alternatives →
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ScreenSmooth▲226Automatically place text behind objects in images. Create POV-style YouTube thumbnails and viral social posts for free.
Apr 2026 · screensmooth.com · its alternatives →
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Marco Gomez (@TheCodeTherapy) - WebGL Portfolio & Lab.
2020 · mgz.me · its alternatives →
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Use live streams as screensavers/lock screens on MacOS - hauxir/macos-live-screensaver
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Collaborative abstract artwork as a screensaver
2014 · electricsheep.org · its alternatives →
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Bauhaus Clock▲207Elegant timepiece screensaver for macOS
2025 · bauhausclock.com · its alternatives →
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KiwiDesk▲147Tiling that feels like it shipped with macOS.
Sep 2026 · kiwidesk.kiwicanopy.com · its alternatives →
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RadianceKit▲95Turn photos into 3D Gaussian Splats on your Mac
Jun 2026 · radiancekit.de · its alternatives →
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Beautiful, useful, and funny designer screensavers.
2016 · its alternatives →
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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →