The macosxhints Rating:

[Score: 8 out of 10]

• Developer: Idle Time / [Product Page]
  
• Price: Free

I am not a huge user of screensavers; my Macs are usually either awake and working for me, the screen has been dimmed if idle for a few minutes, or they're in sleep mode. In fact, I have but one third-party screensaver installed on my system, and it's this one.

I'm not much for most of airline travel -- I dislike the drive to the airport, the parking hassles, the check-in and security process, the waiting, the relatively cramped cabins ... but I do enjoy the actual flight, once it's started and assuming I've managed to snag a window seat. I love watching the planet go by from 35,000 feet; it makes the trip go faster, and there are some great sights to be seen from above (flying over the Grand Canyon into Phoenix, for example).

Enter Holding Pattern, an "out the airliner's window" screensaver. Now you can have those same views without the travel hassles ... OK, not quite the same :). As you sit in your virtual window seat, you'll see various scenery drifting by below, as you can see in the short (1.9MB) movie linked at left (click the photo to play). There's a wide variety of scenery, as well as varied seats within the airplane. And the flights do eventually go somewhere, though you'll have to let the saver play for quite a while to see the end result.

If you're not using an LCD screen, then Holding Pattern may not be the best screensaver -- there are parts of the image (sometimes big parts) that are fixed (the window, a wing, etc.) for a few minutes at a time. It shouldn't be long enough to cause any burn in, but ideally, a screensaver wouldn't have any fixed objects on the screen.

More "screen entertainment" than pure screensaver, Holding Pattern will let you see some nice landscapes drifting by when your Mac's idle ... and it's free! (There is a $200 limited edition that includes even more imagery and other niceties, if you're interested in directly supporting the developers.)