I haven't been looking at screensavers for a long time because of Apple's lack of will (or resources?) to provide a public version of the private modern SDK used by Apple for a very long time now. I'm now looking at the Screen Saver pane in System Settings (the What-If version of System Preferences in an alternate universe where all screens are in portrait mode). In macOS Sequoia, it seems like 3rd party screensavers are not welcome considering that they are relegated to the "Other" section at the bottom of the list and you have to click Show All to start seeing 3rd party screen savers. I also had a quick look at macOS Tahoe Beta 3 and it looks like that all the real screensavers are gone (3rd party and the ones from Apple: Hello, Message, Flurry, etc.) or at least it requires to be a Nobel Prize to find them (and the Search field is not useful). I tried to install a 3rd party screen saver on macOS Tahoe Beta 3, it doesn't show up in the list. To summarize: No public access to modern APIs AFAIK. UI that is hostile to 3rd party screen savers on macOS Sequoia. Apparently only screensavers that are slideshows or movies curated by Apple in macOS Tahoe b3. Hence the question: Is there any future for screen savers on macOS? Because if there's none, I won't waste my time trying to update some old screen savers.

Noticing a few issues with Screen Savers in macOS Tahoe developer beta 1 : The command open x-apple.systempreferences:com.apple.ScreenSaver-Settings.extension no longer works to open the Screen Savers preference pane. The reason? There is no longer a Screen Saver preference pane - it still exists, but it's now a Modal dialog (that can not be resized) that is opened from within the Wallpaper preference pane, by clicking a button. Something funny is happening with legacyScreensaver - I think that ScreenSaverView.Init(frame:isPreview) may be passing wrong values, e.g. the isPreview boolean is false in Preview mode? I've submitted Feedback # FB17895600 about some of these, and will report back more as I figure things out. Please feel free to add to this thread, thanks!

Hey all, I’m experiencing a consistent issue with notarizing a signed .pkg file that contains a macOS screen saver (.saver) bundle. Nothing online so far except 1 thread on the form from the altool time pre-2023 so i thought it worth another update. Here is what I did: I signed the .saver bundle using my Developer ID Application certificate. I packaged it into a .pkg using pkgbuild with my Developer ID Installer certificate: I submitted the resulting .pkg via xcrun notarytool: xcrun notarytool submit saver-name.pkg --apple-id email@email.com --password [app-specific-password] --team-id xxxxxxxxx The submission appears to be accepted and uploads successfully. However, the notarization status remains stuck at “In Progress” for hours (over 12h), with no update. I also tried: Repackaging the .pkg with a new name using a zip Resubmitting it under a new submission ID All attempts are stuck in the same “In Progress” state indefinitely. Did anyone solve this yet?

Hello, Im am running Sequoia 15.2 beta. When my screensaver starts en i move my mouse the screen turns black and i only see my mouse pointer. Further nothing happens and i need to force reboot my macbook pro m1. Is this a familiar issue or does any one know what to do in this case? Kind regards, Martin

I want to be able to write a cross-platform screensaver that works on both Windows and macOS using the Pygame 2D graphics library in Python. On Windows, this is super easy - you just write your program with three possible command line arguments: /p for preview mode, /c for the configuration dialog mode, and /s for the actual full-screen screensaver mode. Then you just use pyinstaller to build an .exe file and rename the extension to .scr, and you're good to go. However, it seems that making a screensaver on macOS is a pretty convoluted process, and there was stuff about specific Objective-C functions that you had to write, and I didn't really understand the documentation. Could you please tell me if there is any way to simply get my Python Pygame program to build as a proper .saver file? Thanks!