Yesterday I noticed that there is now a “Gold” version of Electric Sheep which offers high definition imagery, plus faster sheep downloads. I used to use Electric Sheep years ago. However, I became disappointed by the image quality on my 27” iMac. -- it was both blurry and pixelated -- so I stopped using it.
When I saw that there is now a “Gold” version, my hopes were raised, and I thought that maybe Electric Sheep would be worth using again. However, upon reading the Electric Sheep website, I came to see that “high definition” only means 1280x720 pixels. As I wrote to Scott Draves, that may be fine on a 17” or a 15” MacBook Pro, but I had doubts that ES would look much better on a 24" iMac with a default screen resolution of 1920x1200.
Scott wrote me back and said that I could always cancel my subscription if I was not satisfied. So, just to satisfy my curiosity, I went ahead and subscribed to their monthly plan, and began the one-day free trial period.
Well, less than twelve hours later, I have already canceled my subscription. As I said, 1280x720 may look good on a MacBook Pro, but it just doesn't cut it yet on my iMac. It isn't just that the images are not sharp and crisp, it is that I also find the sheep themselves rather boring and old school.
I also purchased G-Force Platinum almost three years ago. Personally, I find G-Force Platinum to be much more to my liking. While it is 50% more expensive than a yearly subscription to Electric Sheep, and even though the iTunes plugin no longer works thanks to an Apple bug, nevertheless, there is so much more that you can do with it, and everything is very clear and sharp -- even on my iMac -- being as it is all local.
So, if you want to pay money for a screensaver -- there are a number of good free ones out there -- I would say to go with G-Force Platinum on an iMac.