The macosxhints Rating:

[Score: 9 out of 10]

• Developer: garageCUBE / Product Page
  
• Price: Freeware / Open source

Another not-too-useful but quite fun PotW this week. CosmicPainter is a kaleidoscope generator with all sorts of options for color (including colors changing over time), shape, transparency, and rotation speed. Basic operation is quite simple -- click a brush, set the color options, set the rotation speed, then click and hold on the drawing window. The window is spinning at whatever speed you specified, and the brush will paint as long as you hold the mouse button down -- so to form a perfect circle, just click and hold. To make a spiral, click and drag. It's much harder to explain than it is to actually do, so just download it and give it a try! When you're done, you can maximize the shape on the current monitor, or even mirror it full-screen to a second screen.

You can make some interesting shapes [692KB movie] quite easily. The only real omission is that you can't export a QuickTime movie of your creation, just still PNG images (I created the linked movie above by using SnapzPro X). As I said, not the world's most important piece of software, but a fun diversion for yourself or your kids...