Technical Q&A QA1666

Building Screen Savers for Snow Leopard

Q:  My screen saver is grayed out in the list in the Screen Savers System Preferences panel on Snow Leopard. When I click on it a sheet pops down that says: "You cannot use the <XXX> screen saver on this computer. Contact the developer of this screen saver for a newer version.". I am the developer of this screen saver, what do I have to do to make it work with Snow Leopard?

A: My screen saver is grayed out in the list in the Screen Savers System Preferences panel on Snow Leopard.

When I click on it a sheet pops down that says: "You cannot use the <XXX> screen saver on this computer. Contact the developer of this screen saver for a newer version.".

I am the developer of this screen saver, what do I have to do to make it work with Snow Leopard?

Figure 1  Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) Screen Saver System Preference Panel.

Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) screen savers should be built to require Garbage Collection on the X86_64 architecture.

For example, to build a screen saver that will run on both Leopard (10.5) and Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger):

Listing 1  Xcode Project or Target Settings necessary for Snow Leopard Screen Savers

ARCHS = x86_64 $(ARCHS_STANDARD_32_BIT) MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET = 10.4 SDKROOT = macosx10.6 GCC_ENABLE_OBJC_GC = unsupported GCC_ENABLE_OBJC_GC[sdk=macosx10.6][arch=x86_64] = required
Figure 2  Xcode Screen Saver Target Settings


Document Revision History


DateNotes
2009-10-09

New document that shows how to build screen savers that will work with Snow Leopard (10.6)