Eclipse

   Have you ever made your own screen saver?
   There are probably 80-gazillion programs out there that will let you put a few – or a lot – of your own pictures on a screen saver screen. Now and again, those programs will even let you select a transition between one or another picture. But that's about it.
   I am here to tell you that Active Media's Eclipse screen saver generating program is the hippest, coolest and baddest screen saver maker you have ever seen. It has more options than Carter used to have Little Liver Pills. It has an elegant interface, top-quality previewing and an absolutely killer option (see box further down on this page and to the left) that is worth the price of the program alone.
   Eclipse comes in several flavors. At its least expensive, you can generate screen savers to your heart's content on one computer for 20 bucks or so. At the other end of the spectrum, the professional developer's version lets you generate screen savers for the world, package them in their own setup files, use your own custom logos, add readme files and even manage passwords to unlock versions you can sell to other folks and download.

SPACE INVADERS IN A SCREEN SAVER? OH, MY!

   I got involved with computers about 20 years ago when I bought a Radio Shack Color Computer, a CoCo.
   It was a great computer, but the screen – at 32 characters – often presented programming challenges.
   I don't think I will ever forget the day a program fragment arrived in the mail from one of my friends, Tom Rosenbaum of Spectral Associates in Tacoma, with the simple message to "load this."
   I did, the program auto-started, the screen blinked, and there, in high graphic resolution was a little space invader (who looked like he had been cloned from the wildly popular arcade game) sitting on the screen. It was an amazing piece of programming at the time.
   Eclipse has an amazing piece of programming, too. A "Space Invaders" screen saver. There is only one difference: you pick the images for the space invaders (up to four of them), the cannonwhich shoots them and the forts the cannon can hide behind. There is even a bonus image that runs across the top of the screen. And a score, too!
   Make your ex-spouse the space invaders and shoot with your own image as the cannon! Can't stand the obnoxious guy in the next cubicle? Make him the space invader.
   Ultra cool!
   –Lonnie Falk

I am going to give you but one example of how through the people at Active Media are: their password generating module not only generates the passwords, but spells out the phonic equavilent. No more letter Oh or Zero confusion. It is really cool.
   We are showing you Eclipse's main screen for one of the 30-plus modules that is like the "Flying Through Space" screen saver which comes with Windows. You will recall you can "fly" a character with the built-in program.
   How much better is Eclipse? See the first line in the screen shot above, the one which reads "Image County?" Here you can "fly" eight different images. Any kind of images: pictures, drawings or text (just make the text out in a graphic program). Leave trails? Have a lot or a little of each image? Fast or slow? Have the images shift horizontally or vertically? And this is just one of the screen savers you can make.
   Also worthy of your attention is a second tab in the section to the right of the screen shot. That controls the features of the screen saver. For instance, you can have Eclipes type a message across the bottom of the screen. In any font. In any color. With a variety of ways to display the message. You also set things like background colors (or images) here.
   On the left side of the main screen is where you can see your modules. Eclipse lets you have multiple modules, so, for instance, you can go "Flying Through Space" and then transition to another cool setup called "Scrapbook," and on to something else. In addition to having the modules do different things, you can set the features of each module to be different. This may not seem like much, but it is rather cool,
   Alll this functionality is bult into each version of the program, although the number of modules you can use at one time differs. If you want to distribute your screen savers to other people, you should get a developer's or professional edition.
   While some of the screen saver modules available are what you might call variations on a theme (albiet with a huge variety of options) others are truly unique. And Active Media says more are coming. They plan add-in modules to be released in the future.
   With all this, my one complaint about the program is almost nit-picky. Eclipse requires you have small fonts loaded in order to run the program.I understand why they do this: to be sure all the information fits into the program's window. But it is a pain for me to switch from lasrge fonts to small fonts and reboot the computer just to use this program. I have tried to learn to love small fonts, but on a 1600x1200 display, they are just a little too small to see well. This may not effect you at all.
   Nevertheless, if you want to make screen savers, Eclipse is the program to do it. Its fabulous.

Link to the Active Media web site