Making A Screen Saver (Need Help Please)

[Sup3rkirby]

Alright, so at work I've been asked to make a desktop background and screensaver for our company. This will become standard on all desktops for our company(to keep things uniform and all this other fancy stuff).

I can easily make the desktop background with our logo and all. No problems there. But a screensaver...

Well obviously you need a program to help you make one and such. So does anyone have suggestions or a good place to look so I can get started. Don't worry about learning curves and all. If I can't understand how to use the program, then it is either not meant for human use, or maybe just command prompt(<- slightly sarcastic joke).

lol, could you imagine photoshop running off a command line interface :biggrin:


But seriously, I need a program and relatively soon. The sooner I get one and make it the better I look for my boss.

Also, as you may note in my sig, I love freeware and open source stuff, so there is a priority there.
Edit:
Umm yea...

I could really use some help here. I hate searching for crap like this because the results are almost all crap. I don't want to download 20 programs that are just useless, crappy, a waste of time or even possible adware/spyware infested. There are just certain categories of programs that are hard to try and test.

I need the experienced opinion from someone. Honestly I just need a logo to rotate(with a bit of a 3D appearance). Nothing special. But I also need to be sure that the screensaver that is created is very low on resources. This is important to my boss and if I use a crappy program to make it then the screensaver itself will probably eat up way more resources than needed.


So please x10 community, surely someone out there has made or makes screensavers and can help me find what I need.

 

[Stormscape]

http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Software/Desktop_Customization/Utilities/Screen_Savers/
First result in google for "screensaver creator open source"

 

[Sup3rkirby]

Nice link, just concered about optimization for the programs. Any programmer would know that there are more than too many programs that need or could use more optimization. And in my case optimization is kind of important.

Even if things looked fine, after a month or so if it becomes a bit more obvious that the screensaver is a bit slow, that will make me look bad.

 

[mqute]

Sup3 check out Picasa (google it). It's a free software from google that creates photo gallery and screensavers (which was mentioned in my blog before I decide to move my blog to x10hosting). I am still setting up my blog here....

 

[shaunak]

You can make one online:
http://www.flashmagazine.com/news/detail/creamshavers_online_screensaver_maker/

You will need a swf file though.

 

[pgames]

U can make a video in windows movie maker and make a screensaver from the video with this program: http://www.download.com/PowerToys-Fun-Pack/3000-2339_4-10279480.html?tag=lst-3

 

[Sup3rkirby]

I've heard of Picasa, just didn't know it could make screensavers. That will be something I check out tonight.

Also making one in flash seems like a good option. I actually would like that functionality. I think my best option(for the low resource usage and professional appeal) I might try to make one with our logo and it would simply appear in different places around the screen, like the standard Windows screensaver that comes with all our PCs.

A question on the flash screensaver though. Does the flash code execute properly, like a program where the code itself runs? Is anything lost in the creation of a screensaver from flash?

 

[Sup3rkirby]

Oh my. Creamshavers is rather nice, but I have 1 problem. Image quality. A LOT is lost when it is converted to a screensaver. I have a very nice and pretty logo for my company that I added into flash. This randomly moves around the screen and all and when I view it as just flash it is not half bad.

But once I use Creamshavers and then install the screensaver, my logo is no longer pretty. Almost as if it saves the flash(.swf) file as a screensaver using the 'low' quality setting for flash movies.

Anyone have any other flash suggestions? For creamshavers or another service?

And thank you all for all the help so far. I've just gotta kick it in gear as my boss would like this project done relatively soon.