Electric Sheep

When it comes to screen savers, Electric Sheep takes it to a whole new level. Apart from its abstract animations, it has another ace in the hold. It relies on other computers and users, scattered all over the world.

The program's installation kit weighs at about 19 Mb. It may slow you down a bit if you don't have a fast enough Internet connection, but the installation process will make up for the lost time. The wizard won't require any additional software or drivers to be installed nor does it require a system restart. It takes a few seconds to get ready from the moment you run the setup.

Electric Sheep is essentially a screen saver software. The animations are called "sheep" and they're designed by individual users all over the world. All you need to do is set it as your screen saver from Window's personalization panel. When the sheep kicks in, you'll see different animations, created by other users. If you run the program for the first time, it's recommended that you leave your screen saver running for a longer time or overnight in order to get new sheep in the program's cache folder. Alternatively, you can manually download animations from the sheep server. Just browse around and click on one in order to start downloading it. If you buy the premium version of Electric Sheep and become a member, you'll have access to more and higher resolution sheep and other benefits.

You will need to create an account on the program's website. This way, you can join a community of thousands of people and this is where the fun starts. You can create your own sheep using third party software like Fr0st or Apophysis. If you're a Mac user, you can use Oxidizer and Linux have their choice of Apophysis under Wine or Qosmic. If you create your own sheep, other users from around the world can see it and give it a yey or ney using the up or down arrows on the keyboard. The life span of a sheep depends on its popularity. If a sheep is popular, it will live longer and it can reproduce so that the "flock" may evolve to further please the audience.

Electric Sheep's interface is mainly an options panel. It consists of a number of general settings, all placed on different tabs. You can set a maximum disk space to be used by the sheep which is automatically downloaded from the sheep server, make settings regarding the sheep's playback, how should it be displayed and more.