Offshoots animates the wallpaper of your desktop with growing trees. The growth follows some easy-to-hack parameters. The offshoots lazily follow your mouse cursor or random points. Also available as a screensaver.
I really like my desktop wallpaper. Can I make the trees grow over it? Yes: you can set Offshoots to use you current wallpaper as the background. Or you can choose your favorite solid color. Or a mix of the two. The default option is to make it randomly choose among one of its predefined colors.
What if I really like the current image and I want to save it? You can copy the image to the clipboard (Command-C or from the menu) and save it from Preview or from your editor of choice. You can also simply hold on the current image with Pause command.
Will it hog my CPU? It is very unlikely: the application should take a very reasonable portion of the CPU time. You can also change some parameters to further reduce the CPU load: for example you can change the frame rate. When you're headed for some heavy computation, you can also pause Offshoots from the menu or with Command-P. Or you can choose to make it appear only after some time that your computer has been idle.
What if I want it as a screensaver? The release contains a screensaver version of it too. Drop it in the "Library/Screen Savers" folder of your Home and choose it from the system preferences' panel. Or you can test the "ScreenSaver mode" in the standalone application.
My desktop is always hidden. What if I want the trees more visible? You can choose the level of the window from the preferences. You can even set it as an always on top window, setting a low value (zero) for alpha: the Offshoots window always ignores your mouse clicks so you can interact with the other apps' windows as usual.
I want to experiment with the settings but I fear I won't be able to return to the old ones. (NEW) You can save presets from the preferences and recall them whenever you want.
GLA Simple to use, quite interesting concept which is well executed. Would like to see more texture on branches/twigs, and more natural branch shapes. (Version 1.2)