Behold, The Google Trends Screensaver
Want to know what’s trending on Google? Now you can, with a screensaver. Google outed the nifty new tool in a Google+ post, and you can see it in action for yourself here.
You can set up the look of the Google Trends screensaver in a couple of different ways. There’s a little 25-square grid in the upper left part of the screen. You can click a single tile so that you see one trending story at a time, which changes to a new topic every few seconds, or you can click and drag to highlight all 25 tiles and see a constantly shifting array of topics filling your screen.
Actually, you can opt for essentially whatever you configuration you like--5 vertical tiles, 5 horizontal tiles, or some combination of horizontal and vertical. You can view all trending topics, or you can select a specific region with a menu item tucked down on the lower left part of the screen.
Unfortunately, the actual screensaver is only for Mac users. Further, when you click on a trending topic, nothing happens; that may not be the case when the software is installed on your Mac, but if so it’s certainly an odd feature omission.
On a final note, it’s interesting that the Google Trends screensaver looks an awful lot like Microsoft’s Live Tiles for Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone.
You can set up the look of the Google Trends screensaver in a couple of different ways. There’s a little 25-square grid in the upper left part of the screen. You can click a single tile so that you see one trending story at a time, which changes to a new topic every few seconds, or you can click and drag to highlight all 25 tiles and see a constantly shifting array of topics filling your screen.
Actually, you can opt for essentially whatever you configuration you like--5 vertical tiles, 5 horizontal tiles, or some combination of horizontal and vertical. You can view all trending topics, or you can select a specific region with a menu item tucked down on the lower left part of the screen.
Unfortunately, the actual screensaver is only for Mac users. Further, when you click on a trending topic, nothing happens; that may not be the case when the software is installed on your Mac, but if so it’s certainly an odd feature omission.
On a final note, it’s interesting that the Google Trends screensaver looks an awful lot like Microsoft’s Live Tiles for Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone.
