DeskSaver 0.9

Vacuous Virtuoso (Ankur Kothari)
Rating: ☆☆☆☆☆

One day bad, another day good. One day one of the most abominable abortive software projects ever surfaces, another day Ankur Kothari reacts and in ten minutes puts together the antidote.

It's called 'programming'.

DeskSaver performs that cute command line trick of getting your default screen saver to run as your desktop background picture.

/System/Library/Frameworks/ScreenSaver.framework/Resources/ ScreenSaverEngine.app/Contents/MacOS/ScreenSaverEngine -background

DeskSaver is a mere 30 KB to download and a mere 104 KB on disk. As compared to the mutant it replaces which weighs in at fifteen times that size (and crashes all over the place to boot).

And as it's an authentic native Cocoa application you can do a few other things too. Such as freezing the current picture and starting up again. So much the better - if you're going to invest some of your disk free space in something like this in the first place.

DeskSaver is officially at version 0.9 but there probably won't be that many upgrades: there really isn't that much more to do after you get it right the first time.

See Also
Vacuous Virtuoso: DeskSaver
The Very Ugly: Wallsaver 1.3.6