GSoC/GCI Archive
Google Code-in 2010 Haiku

Write a screensaver for Haiku

completed by: goffrie

mentors: Philippe Houdoin, Ryan Leavengood

There are a few screensavers included with Haiku, here's your chance to write one as well.

You can look at the source code of the ones included with Haiku to see what a screensaver needs in order to work on Haiku:
http://dev.haiku-os.org/browser/haiku/trunk/src/add-ons/screen_savers

And/or check out the sample ones available on BeBits: 
http://bebits.com/app/3019.
Under sample-code/screen_savers, there is 3 screensavers. "Spots" is a very simple saver, which draws black holes over the desktop. Here is your starting point.

From here, you'll need to know better how to draw something on a BView:
http://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-docs/bebook/TheInterfaceKit_Drawing.html

From there it's up to you to add your own flare.  Show us what you can do.


If you are new to Haiku. you'll need to install Haiku either on real hardware or in a VM, with enough hard drive space to do some work, perhaps around 2-3GB should be fine.  You'll also want a fairly recent build since a couple screensaver related bugs were fixed recently.  Nightly images are available here:
http://www.haiku-files.org

Please notice that due to a bug in Haiku, the sample "Spots" screensaver (or any that draw over the desktop) wasn't working as expected until revision 39789 : the background was not the Desktop but blank.
If you plan to write a screensaver that needs the desktop as its background, you must use an Haiku revision no older than 39789.