While Screen Savers may not be quite the essential system function they once were in the days of CRT monitors, they remain a great way of personalizing your Mac, whether at home or in the workplace. Setting up a Screen Saver on your Mac is a relatively simple process, but there are a wealth of choices available to help you find your perfect Screen Saver.
In this tutorial, we’ll take a look at setting up a Screen Saver, adjusting its timing and assigning it to a Hot Corner:
1.) Open System Preferences by clicking on the icon in the Dock:
2.) Click on Desktop & Screen Saver from the Personal pane on the top row of System Preferences:
3.) Select the Screen Saver tab. You will be presented with an interface similar to this:
4.) Click on the name of each Screen Saver in the left-hand pane and you will be presented with a preview of the effect on the right-hand side of the interface:
5.) You can select from a variety of types of Screen Saver: animated visualizations, RSS feeds, iTunes artwork as well as static images and slideshows from your iPhoto Library’s Albums and Events. In this example, we’ve chosen the Word of the Day option:
6.) Once you have selected the desired Screen Saver you can set the time that needs to elapse before it begins with the Start Screen Saver slider. In this case, we’ve set it to 25 minutes:
You can also choose to use a randomized Screen Saver, to display the time and to only activate a Screen Saver on your main monitor from this lower pane.
7.) To configure a mouse movement to launch your Screen Saver, click on Hot Corners…, select the desired screen corner and then choose Start Screen Saver from the drop-down menu. Click OK to exit:
You can then test the Hot Corner function by moving your mouse cursor to the selected corner.
If you’d like to further tailor your Screen Saver to your tastes, Apple have a number of free and paid Screen Savers to download at their Icons, Screen savers, etc. page.
