Mac: How to use web sites as screen savers

Screen savers can be great fun on your Mac, they add a very personal touch to your computer that differentiates it from others. Most people tend to use the usual kinds of screen savers for their Macs.

But now there’s a new app called WebViewScreenSaver that will actually let you use your favorite web sites as screensavers.

Paul Horowitz details how to use WebViewScreenSaver for OS X Daily:

You can use any URL, site, or web page, and you can even reference a remote list of URLs if desired.

1. Get WebViewScreenSaver

2. Once it has finished downloading, right-click and choose “Open” to bypass Gatekeeper and install the screen saver (or install the screen saver manually)

3. Open System Preferences and go to “Display & Screen Saver” settings, and under the Screen Saver tab locate and select the newly installed WebViewScreenSaver

4. Choose “Screen Saver Options” and use “Add URL” button to add a website address to the screen saver, you can change the URL by selecting it from the address list then hitting the Return key, (go ahead and add http://osxdaily.com of course)

5. Close the screen saver and enjoy your new website screen saver

More at OS X Daily

I couldn’t resist installing WebViewScreenSaver on my 5K iMac, so I snagged it and set it up. Then I added the Drudge Report site to it, and waited to see if it would actually work.

Sure enough, the Drudge Report loaded up just fine. I was able to check out the latest news there with no problems. Here’s what it looked like on my 5K iMac’s screen when it came up as my screen saver:

Note that you can add more than one site to WebViewScreenSaver, and the app will cycle through them. So it has the potential to work very well as a way of monitoring news sites. Right now though I prefer to just leave it with one site, though I may add others at some point.

It might also work very well for social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, etc. You can customize how often WebViewScreenSaver updates each site. The default is 300 seconds but you can easily change that if you prefer a longer or shorter time.

For now I’ll be keeping WebViewScreenSaver as my default screen saver on my iMac. I’m rather enjoying being able to glance at my screen as I walk by to see the latest news from Drudge.

Did you miss a post? Check the Eye On Apple home page to get caught up with the latest news, discussions and rumors about Apple.