"Review of Software on the Market for Creating Screensavers"
by William Keith

I spent many hours in November of 2004 evaluating shareware software for creating screensavers. I was looking for software that would allow me to create my own screensavers with my own images. I wanted software that would allow me to distribute my screensavers royalty free. I was particularly interested in finding software that included a "pan" transition affect, e.g. it would slide the current image out while sliding the new in. This would allow me to display panoramas. Below are my comments on the software I downloaded and tried out. The operating system I used to evaluate this software was Windows NT 4.0, although I also did some trials on Windows 2000.

Screensaver Factory 3, Version 3.2 (Blumentals Software, $25.85, $38.85 for Pro) (Grade=B)
This software had a very nice interface. It was very easy to use. It did not have the pan affect I was looking for. The nag message included on the screensavers created with the unregistered version is tucked into the top left corner of the screen and is written in a small font. Thus, even the screen savers created with this unregistered version are useable for the less discerning. The screen saver that I created with this software had one minor bug. The Windows "Display Properties" dialog box disappears behind any open applications when closing the screen saver settings dialog box. I saw this bug on both Windows NT and Windows 2000 systems. This is no big deal but makes me reluctant to use this software for creating screen savers for distribution. If this bug was eliminated, this software would be an A.

ScreensaverXP, Version 3.2.1497 (Consulting Nation, $30) (C+)
Seemed like nice software, but it was difficult to judge because much of the functionality was disabled in the trial version including all transition affects, size and position settings, background selection, etc. I successfully created a screensaver for my computer and it seemed to work fine.

Screen Viralizer, Version 1.0, (Verilizer.net) (C)
This software is very simple. You load the images and create the screensaver file, either a screensaver (.scr) or a self installing executable (.exe). There is no tailoring of settings. The user, via the screensaver settings dialog box, can turn the transition affects either on or off but can not control what affects are used. The user also can control the redraw speed and whether to shuffle images or not. It is simple software that might suffice for simple needs.

ScreensaverMaker 2.30 (EasyScreensaver.com, $24.95)(C-)
It seemed to have nice interface. They had many tranistion affects including the pan effect I was looking for. Yeah!!! They called it a "push" affect. Unfortunately, nothing ever is that simple. When I tried to preview a screensaver, I got an error message - "Run-time error '453': Can't find DLL entry point EnumDisplayMonitors in user 32". When I actually created a screen saver, and tried to run it on my system, I got the same error.

It is not entirely clear to me whose problem this is. A little surfing the web suggests that my system - Windows NT 4.0 with Service Pack 6 - may not support this functionality used in the screensaver software. This would imply that ScreensaverMaker 2.3 really does not support NT as advertised.

I subsequently tried the screensaver I created with this software on a Windows 2000 operating system. The screensaver worked but the affects did not. The transitions were instantaneous.

Tidbit from web which suggests that WindowsNT can not handle ScreensaverMaker 2.30 code:
* gdk/win32/gdkdisplay-win32.c (count_monitor, enum_monitor): New functions, enumeration functions passed to EnumDisplayMonitors().

(gdk_display_open): If the EnumDisplayMonitors() and GetMonitorInfo() API is present (on Win98, Win2000 and newer), use it to find out monitor info.


AiCando Screensaver Maker, Version 1.2 (AiCando Software, $28.95) (D)
This screensaver uses Flash. The interface was confusing. I couldn't even figure it out how to load images. So, this software was basically dead on arrival.

Screen Saver Toolkit, Version 4.0.0.206 (Stardust Software, $139) (F)
Downloaded but didn't seem to run on my computer. Dead on Arrival.

If you have any comments you'd like to share with the author, please email me at "[email protected]"
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