Storming Ions screen saver
A friend approached me one day and asked if I knew how to write screen savers. Uh-oh, I said…
She spoke of a field where coloured dots - representing ions - swirl around a black hole. So I dusted off some code I wrote in 1999, reread up on Newton’s laws of motion, and started tinkering. I haven’t seen the original, and have only been working from a vague description of it, so this isn’t a clone or derivative so much as an inspired work. The result is a Windows screensaver called Storming Ions, and is MIT-licensed.
Sadly it seems that Microsoft changed something under the hood with Windows 7 and while their developer kit still includes a simple screensaver library you can link against, it doesn’t work as well as it used to.
Nevertheless, I preserve it for posterity: