setBeforeMe (Ps. 119:30) is a screensaver designed to display text, such as quotations, over an image background.

The primary focus is on taking advantage of unused screen time to keep reminding the user of desired words and ideas, long-term. A secondary focus is on aesthetic quality.

Possible applications for content include remembering Bible verses, pithy quotations, or foreign language vocabulary.

Distinctive features:

• text and background images are completely user-specifiable
• text and backgrounds are independent of each other
• user can configure how long text is displayed (which may depend on number of characters)
• quality, antialiased text rendering
• text and backgrounds zoom and pan slowly (at user option)
• proper handling of non-Roman scripts, including right-to-left, thanks to Pango
• cross-platform, using GTK+
• backgrounds can be gif, jpg, png, or bmp
• text and backgrounds can come from RSS or Atom feeds
• automatic, configurable word wrapping for long text
• certain HTML formatting tags are supported in text

Status:

setBeforeMe is in pre-alpha as of 2008-08-14.