LibraryThing Mac Screensaver

See http://www.librarything.com/blog/2009/03/librarything-mac-screensaver_11.php .

Hmm... as a PC user not much use to me - particularly as it's not a proper feed, so I can't use it in equivalent programs on the PC. You should be using the media:content or enclosure tags to enclose images. Be on the save side and use both. See this Flickr feed as an example. If you supported that, I could use John's Background Switcher which would be very cool. I could also use Google Photos Screensaver

Add _enc at the end of the format parameter to get enclosures too, as markbarnes recommends: http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?tags=librarything&lan...
It's not 100% legit, since those enclosures don't have length attributes, but nothing seems to actually care.

I would like to use this, but I do not seem to have the "RSS and Mobile Me" choice under pictures.

I am using 10.4.11. I guess that is not available to me?

Alicia V.

Oh...yes, it's probably only available in Leopard. I haven't used Tiger in a while so I'm not sure.

I mentioned in the other thread that enclosures are certainly doable because they were in there at one point. We'll look at getting them back in. I'm quite interested in your note that mentioned that the length attribute is ignored on the windows side. It's also ignored by the Mac saver. That's good since our images are on a different file system from the RSS generator and they are made to order when requested by the client, so getting their sizes would be a royal pain.

My partner told me to ask if it matters if it's for Intel or PPC... I'm getting a message that says I have no pictures. Any guidance would be fantastic :) Thank you!

I had that message. I saved the same url a second time and it started working.

eta: I'm Intel

It's a feature of the OS, it's not hardware-dependent. I'm running 10.5.x on a PPC machine and it works fine for me.

I got nothing but the validation swirly thing for the longest time, gave up, and tried again later. Still got the validation swirly thing. I clicked cancel (or continue or whatever it was the blue button said) and all of a sudden, it could find pictures and there were my covers.

(My husband loves it when I use technical language :-)

Good to know, anglemark... Will just keep trying until it works, then!

Yeah, I don't know what the deal is with it sometimes working. If you really can't get it to work, add &version=1 (or 2, 3, 4, 5,) and it will think it's a new URL and refetch it.

T

I tried it out. I initially received the "you have no pictures" message. But then I hit the options button again (or something like that) and it works. I think it's great.

Are people ever getting different covers? I don't know how long apple caches feeds, but I haven't seen it change yet.

Oh yes, no problem there. It's definitely many more than the initial set of 50.

I'm getting some different covers now.

I set this up on my 5G iMac (non-Intel) with no issues. Or with almost no issues. I don't know if it constantly refreshes its supply of covers, but I definitely notice new covers showing up after I've added new items to My Books, which is cool.
One thing happened yesterday that may have been a bug, a glitch, or a deliberate quirk, because it was pretty funny. I tried to take a screenshot, but realized that pressing the keys would kill the screen saver, so instead I ran for the digital camera, only to find that it had changed its behavior before I could snap a picture.
Basically it picked one cover and just kept using it over and over again. The entire screen was filled up with one cover overlapping itself many times over. But, after it had completely filled the screen with the same image, it started throwing in some variety. I've only seen that once in the weeks that I've had it running, but it was funny to see.

The SAME book keeps coming up...it is the last one I added....it just started doing this. How can I fix it please.

Looks like Rob_E is having the same problem....I didn't notice that any others came up after the screen was filled, but I didn't wait that long.

THANKS...hope there is a solution.

I did e-mail one of the directors to see if they can help.

e-mail one of the directors

One of the directors? Tim Spalding or Jeff Bezos?

//Runs, ducks, weaves. Oh god, there's nowhere to hide!//

Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they're not out to get you.

It has indeed started to recycle the same covers an awful lot the last few days.

Thanks for the information.....perhaps there is a glitch.

One of the directors? Tim Spalding or Jeff Bezos?

Actually, justjim, I wrote to Abby.

Try changing the URL in some random way—ie., ?version=1. This will defeat the application or ISP-level caching that, I think, is causing this.

Good Morning:

Not sure what you mean by changing the URL, timspalding, but it started to work again this morning...Yippee.

THANKS.

this thread seems a little old, but I'll ask anyway: was wondering if anyone had a librarything screensaver for Windows? :)

thanks -Thomas

Oooooooh!
Just found this.
Coooooooool!

Alas, Apple has dropped RSS support from the new OS, Mountain Lion. I will miss this screensaver; it was the one I used all the time. :(