Offshoots animates the wallpaper of your desktop with growing trees. The growth follows some easy-to-hack parameters. The offshoots lazily follow your mouse cursor or random points. Also available as a screensaver.
- I really like my desktop wallpaper. Can I make the trees grow over it?
Yes: you can set Offshoots to use you current wallpaper as the background. Or you can choose your favorite solid color. Or a mix of the two. The default option is to make it randomly choose among one of its predefined colors. - What if I really like the current image and I want to save it?
You can copy the image to the clipboard (Command-C or from the menu) and save it from Preview or from your editor of choice. You can also simply hold on the current image with Pause command. - Will it hog my CPU?
It is very unlikely: the application should take a very reasonable portion of the CPU time. You can also change some parameters to further reduce the CPU load: for example you can change the frame rate. When you're headed for some heavy computation, you can also pause Offshoots from the menu or with Command-P. Or you can choose to make it appear only after some time that your computer has been idle. - What if I want it as a screensaver?
The release contains a screensaver version of it too. Double click on it to install it. Or you can test the "ScreenSaver mode" in the standalone application. - My desktop is always hidden. What if I want the trees more visible?
You can choose the level of the window from the preferences. You can even set it as an always on top window, setting a low value (zero) for alpha: the Offshoots window always ignores your mouse clicks so you can interact with the other apps' windows as usual. - I want to experiment with the settings but I fear I won't be able to return to the old ones.
You can save presets from the preferences and recall them whenever you want.
