Entertainment
After Dark was an early screensaver for the Macintosh platform, and later PC/Windows, which prominently featured whimsical designs such as flying toasters. Perhaps in response to the workplace environment in which they are often viewed, many screensavers continue this legacy of whimsy by populating the idle monitor with animals or fish, games, and visual expressions of mathematics equations (through the use of fractals) as in the Electric Sheep screensaver.
The ability of screensavers to divert and entertain is used for promotion, especially to build buzz for "event-based" products such as feature films.
The screensaver is also an outlet for the work of creative computer programmers. The Unix-based screensaver XScreenSaver collects the display effects of other Unix screensavers, which are termed "display hacks" in the jargon file tradition of US computer science academics. It also collects forms of computer graphics effects called demo effects, originally included in demos created by the demo scene.
Read more about this topic: Screensaver