Review of: |
| I have a love-hate relationship with screensavers.
Screensavers once served a legitimate purpose. Older monitors would suffer "burn in" if an image lingered too long on the screen. If you impulsively typed a nasty letter to your boss then left the room for a while, when you came back your hasty diatribe was embossed on your monitor forever. Screensavers kicked in to keep the pixels from homesteading on a fixed place on the screen. Newer monitor technology overcame that problem years ago. You could leave a document on your screen for a month and do no damage. So why do we still use screensavers? They're fun, of course. The Internet has created a renaissance in the genre. Almost every hot movie has its own screensaver - I used the Amistad one until it drove me up the wall. In September I downloaded a Princess Diana tribute screensaver, complete with music. There are screensavers to please every taste. On the downside, they are totally useless memory hogs that tend to kick in at awkward moments. Let's face it - for the most part, they are toys. I've always had a secret desire to create my own custom screensaver, but couldn't justify the cost of registering even the most modestly priced shareware program. Last month, I discovered a free program, XaraCube, produced by Xara, a division of Corel. My prayers were answered. The program is available from the Xara website, www.xara.com/xaracube/. At 643 KB, it's a fairly fast download. The self-extracting file is easy to install. We've uploaded it to the BBS as well. It's a Windows 95 product, although an older version of the program is available that will run with Windows 3.x if you also install the Win32s patch. XaraCube screensaver is a cube with a picture on each of the six faces that floats and drifts across your monitor. It comes with its own generic graphics, but you can replace them with any .BMP files of your own. I took the Alamo PC logo and converted it to a .BMP file, and put it on all the faces of the cube. You can have a different picture on each side: I cropped a photo of my husband that I had taken with my digital camera and it turned out fine, albeit a little jaggy. You can vary the size of the cube, the speed of its rotation, and the number of cubes. If you have more than one cube, one face of the cube will be filled with the Xara logo, a minor inconvenience that doesn't occur when you limit yourself toa single cube. There is also the option of having your picture cube float in a sea of little confetti-like cubes. These can also be configured as to number, speed, size and spacing. They are in primary colors and do not contain pictures. I was so proud of myself that I installed the Alamo PC XaraCube on all of the computer lab computers (there have to be some perks to being president!) so if you use the lab, you can see it in action. Why are they giving this away? The enticement of this free utility drew me to the Xara web page, and got me lusting after their other products: CorelXara, XaraWebster, Xara3D and Xara WebStyle. If you're listening, Corel, we'd sure like these products to review! Susan Ives, the President of Alamo PC, should have better things to do than play with her screensaver.
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