There are three good free applications that can display Quartz animations on your desktop: Desksaver Plus, Quartz Desktop, and this one... QCDesktop. For a variety of reasons, it's clear that the young programmer who came up with QCDesktop is now leading in this space. Chief among its virtues, which no other desktop-screensaver app can match, is its ability to run screensavers at several different window levels:
- The desktop itself, under the icons (this is the usual trick),
- On the desktop, covering the icons,
- In the layer with normal applications, and
- Floating above other applications, but below the menubar (and dashboard widgets, if you run those on your desktop).
Now that's cool enough to make me want this gorgeous freeware, but on top of that QCDesktop lets you
- Adjust the opacity of the Quartz animation as it's playing
- Adjust the frame rate of the animation, which has a big impact on CPU usage, and
- Maintain a menu of recently played animations in its menubar icon, which is where this little puppy lives.
With all of these virtues, QCDesktop is now a proud member of the Mars software family! I actually use one or two others for running non-Quartz screensavers, but for Quartz Compositions, nothing is better than this!
