Fluid2 is here!
Mirrors
Fluid 2 brings more graphics goodness into your life everytime it starts. Plus, Fluid is guaranteed to help your productivity in no way whatsoever. The newest version of Fluid adds tons of new features including increased speed and graphics quality.
"What is Fluid?", you may ask. Fluid is a screensaver for Mac OS X. But, Fluid isn't just any screensaver. It is a realtime fluid-dynamics model that renders to your screen using wave velocity color-coding and reflections on the surface of the waves. Fluid also has its own particle engine so that it can visualize particles within the liquid medium. Add to that the ability to show the streaklines of the currents and you've got yourself one really intense screensaver.
What's New?
Fluid 2.6 brings a few new rendering capabilities to the table. Most exciting is the ability to use video feeds as the reflection for the churning liquid. This means that you can now see yourself and your surroundings in the fluid if you have a video camera (an iSight, for instance).
Fluid offers many rendering styles to choose from and they are even better than before. Fluid now has particle rendering, contour outlining, countour filling, and streakline rendering styles to make your Themes unique. Fluid now has liquid that is actually 3-dimensional and shows reflections.
Fluid now comes pre-installed with a set of Themes so that you don't have to install them seperately if you don't want to. The "Themes" capabilities are still there and have been improved with preview icons.
Fluid Themes can now be shared over the local network. Now you can use all of the Themes that are on your neighbor's computer, seamlessly. Network themes show up in your menu in submenus corresponding to the host/user and they can also be used when in "Random" mode in Fluid, which is how we like to run it.
While adding all of these features we also worked on the interface, which has been overhauled to help make it easier to change the multitude of settings that make your Fluid experience unique.
Background images are now URL based. That means that in addition to the normal method of dragging an image from your computer into Fluid to use as a background, now you can also drag an image from your web browser window and it will be used for the background in Fluid. The image will be downloaded each time that Fluid resets so you can use webcam URLs to have a new background with Fluid each time it runs.
Technical Information
Kudos & Comments
"Fluid is awesome. Amazing work! Bravo!"
"Fluid2 is extremely awesome!"
"Thank you for the beautiful...I mean stunning screen saver... I really tripped out on how well Fluid functions on my desktop, it almost scared me! It is "part" of my Mac now."
"As you have probably heard quite a lot, your screensaver is awesome."
- Features
- Highlights the performance and stability of Mac OS X
- Spotlights the power of multi-processor and AltiVec enabled applications.
- Provides a stunning screensaver that you can stare at for hours.
- Supports user-configurable color themes and rendering styles so that you can customize to your personal style and mood.
- Installs via drag-and-drop as a standard OS X screensaver module.
- Uses Rendezvous for networked Theme feature
- Current Version
- 2.6.1 (view ChangeLog)
- Cost/License
- Fluid is donationware (for lack of a better term). We would certainly appreciate it if you would pay for it if you continue using it, although you certainly won't have to worry about the "software police" if you don't pay us either. We won't come after you. See the donation page for more info.
- System & OS Requirements
- Power Macintosh running OS X v10.2 (Jaguar) or greater.
- Credits
- Concept House would like to thank Jos Stam, who's paper "A Simple Fluid Solver based on the FFT" is the basis for Fluid's model.
- The code to create the Theme and Colormap icons that Fluid saves is based on the wonderful IconFamily source.
- The preview icons on the these pages were created with one of our own programs, Iconic. Check it out.
