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?

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):

• The architectures should be set to build 32 and 64-bit Intel (and optionally 32-bit PowerPC).

• The deployment target should be set to the oldest version of the OS that you want to support (for this example Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger)).

• The SDK root should be set to the newest version of the OS that you want to support (for this example Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard)).

• Garbage Collection should be set to "unsupported" for 32-bit on OS versions prior to Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard).

• Garbage Collection should be set to "required" for 64-bit Intel on Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard).

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

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