After Dark
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After Dark, by Berkeley Systems, (2095 Rose Street, Berkeley, CA 94709, (510) 540-5535, Web Site URL: http://www.berksys.com. Street Price of After Dark Collection: $39.95) is probably the most popular commercial screen saver in Macintosh history. It was an instant hit when it was introduced in 1989. Its two signature screen savers were its tropical fish tank, complete with bubbling fish tank sounds and customizable fish, and its flying toasters screen saver, which features toasters with flapping wings and slices of toast flying though space. Berkeley Systems designed After Dark to enable the integration of additional screen saver modules to After Dark, and since 1989 Berkeley Systems has introduced literally hundreds of different screen savers, including popular themed packages such as The Simpson's TV cartoon characters, a set of Star Trek screen savers, a Disney collection, and many more. There is also a growing list of free third-party After Dark-compatible modules available from online services or the Internet, and Berkeley Systems even hosts a competition to see who can design the best After Dark screen saver modules. You can find many of these third-party modules in the Macintosh Utilities Forum on America Online or at Berkeley Systems Web site at http://www.berksys.com. The After Dark control panel has a very well-designed interface that enables you to choose from a list of installed screen savers, and then control certain aspects of each "module" that you add to the collection. For example, on the flying toast module, you can choose how many flying objects (toast and toasters) that you want on the screen at one time, and you can also specify how you'd like your flying toast: light, medium, or dark. There is also an icon of a speaker that enables you to individually adjust the volume for any sound effects that may accompany the modules. In the case of the original flying toasters, it was the sound of the toasters flapping their wings. In the newly updated version, the sound effect is a sound track that sings the flying toaster anthem. The people at Berkeley Systems take this stuff very seriously, but it's really all for fun. An interesting development from Berkeley Systems is its addition of Virex, the virus checker, in the form of a screen saver. When you select the Virex screen saver, it blacks out the screen and displays green three-dimensional outlines of the icons of your hard disk, one after another, to keep the screen moving, but behind the scenes it is scanning your hard disk for any viruses. You can see the progress of the virus search in the bottom of the window listed by percentage. That way if you come back to your computer, and the search is 94 percent complete, you might want to let it go another minute and complete its search before you press any key or move the mouse to return to your normal display.
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