When Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6) was first released, I noted that many (maybe even all) third-party screensavers would no longer work in the new OS. This was because 10.6 required 64-bit compatible screensavers, whereas existing screensavers were 32 bit.
Unlike for the similar problem affecting third-party System Preferences panes (which can be solved by having System Preferences relaunch in 32-bit mode) or plug-ins for applications such as Safari (which has an Info window option to open in 32-bit mode), there is no 32-bit work-around for screensavers. As a result, after upgrading to 10.6, I abandoned all of my old screensavers and went instead with one of Apple's defaults: Cosmos. Not only are the outer space images impressive but, if you have two monitors, a different image appears on each screen.
Content with this arrangement, I stopped checking on the status of my former screensavers. Recently wondering what had happened to them, I visited their Web sites the other day. Pleasant surprise. All four of the screensavers that I had used the most in 10.5 have now been updated to work in 10.6. These are: 3D Weather Globe, My Living Desktop (formerly Serene Saver Pro), Fireflies, and Marine Aquarium 3.
All the updates except Marine Aquarium 3 were free. As I had Marine Aquarium 2.6, there was a $10 charge for the upgrade. I decided to pass on this.
The only install problem I had with the three remaining upgrades occurred with Fireflies. The Desktop & Screen Saver pane refused to install it, claiming it was still not compatible with 10.6. Quitting and relaunching System Preferences solved this glitch.
I had a bigger problem running Living Desktop: although it overall worked in 10.6, it did not randomly select a scene each time (repeatedly staying with the same Serene Saver default movie). Oddly, even though I had downloaded and installed the supposed latest (4.55) version, if I clicked the Check Now button for "Automatically download scenes" in Living Desktop's pane, I was taken to a special Web page claiming that I needed to spend $14.95 to upgrade to a newer version. I could find no link to this option from the site's
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