Screen saver Enhancement

[cogliano]

It would be nice to have a screen saver start after a certain amount of time of keyboard or mouse inactivity. It could simply be blanking the screen or you could get fancy and have a ssapps folder containing screen saver apps to choose or randomly pick from.

[FoamyGuy]

Yeah, this would be a cool feature I think.

I'm hesitant to have screensavers be an entirely different python code file that gets launched because switching between them takes a few seconds and I think people will want the "wake up" from the screen saver back to the launcher to be quicker.

Maybe we can have a ScreenSaver class that provides a displayio.Group object and has a tick() function. Then screen savers can be created by extending that object, setting up the graphics inside the group and doing any animation other visual changes inside of the tick function.

This way the Launcher app gets to remain running and in control. It can import the ScreenSaver sub class(es) show a screensaver group and call tick() on it during idle times, then hide it when idle gets broken.

[RetiredWizard]

I like the screen saver idea and I'm sure however it's implemented will be cool.

I do see the appeal of returning from the screen saver quickly and smoothly however, I think the option of being able to launch standard fruitjam apps as the screen saver has some advantages as well. The matrix app would make a good screen saver and I think there's a learn guide that does flying toasters. In my Fruit Jam app bundle I have a picture frame and jukebox that both might make sense in some situations.

These could probably all be easily ported to run within the ScreenSaver class but having the code as a standalone app and a ScreenSaver class method seems like it might be more troublesome.

Of course the ScreenSaver class could probably be implemented in a way that allowed apps to use it as well so that approach has the advantage that screen savers might be easily implemented within other apps.

Sorry, just my morning musings, not sure they're of any help.... 🤷

[cogliano]

I like the idea of a common screen saver for Fruit Jam OS aware apps I use a full screen rectangle for a screen saver for my CPZ Machine but having the same screen saver and timeout setting across apps would be useful.

I was initially thinking this for the Fruit Jam OS screen but opening it up to other apps would be great too.

[cogliano]

Of course you would need to keep the state of the app when switching to the screen saver in order to return to the same place so starting a new app as a screen saver may be problematic.