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I made a bit of a mistake while writing Wallsaver 2.0.

Most people (unless they add third party screen savers) don’t have anything inside the “/Library/Screen Savers” or “~/Library/Screen Savers” folders. Because of a bug in the code (details below), a lot of people were given the following error:

Can’t make every file of «class ects» of alias "Macintosh HD:Library:Screen Savers:" into type «class alst». (-1700)

In the program, there’s a bit of code that adds all the screen savers in a folder to a list. The code will run if the folder is empty or even if the folder doesn’t exist.

The bad code:
set UserScreenSavers to (files of entire contents of UserScreenSaversPath) as alias list

The fix, as you can see, is quite simple. Simply throw the offending code into a try statement. If any part fails (i.e., the folder is empty or doesn’t exist), set the list to null.

The better code:

try
set UserScreenSavers to (files of entire contents of UserScreenSaversPath) as alias list

end try


Why didn’t I put in the try block from the beginning? On both of the computers I use to test software (yes, I do test my software), all three of the directories Wallsaver searches in for screen savers exist and have files in them. There was just no opportunity for the list population to fail.

Thank you to all the users of Wallsaver who quickly downloaded (some within 2 hours of the release) v2.0 and reported the bug. Your efforts helped in the v2.1 update being released as quickly as it did.

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I wrote yesterday that Wallsaver was coming along nicely and that it would be released within one week.

I lied.

Wallsaver 2.0 has officially been released. Here’s a copy & paste of the change log from the Wallsaver product page:

• You may now choose any screen saver in the “/System/Library/Screen Savers”, “/Library/Screen Savers/” or “~/Library/Screen Savers” folders.

• The new icon properly scales up to 512×512 pixels and depicts a screen saver that is Wallsaver compatible.

The screen shot below pretty much sums up the biggest feature of the 2.0 release.

So head on over to Wallsaver’s product page and download a copy. If you’re an existing user (you == win) you can update to Wallsaver 2.0 via the built in update utility.

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