Hey everyone, here’s Screenstagram, our Instagram-driven screen saver for the Mac!

Download it here, or read on for details.

We love photos from our friends and we love APIs. We even like a screen saver every now and then. So when Instagram launched their API back in February, we took the opportunity to play around with all of these things and create Screenstagram.

In a nutshell, Screenstagram displays photos from Instagram. It can show you your friends’ photos or photos from the Instagram popular feed, which contains highly rated photos from across the Instagram community.

Here’s a video of it:

It took us a while to figure out what to build with the new web service. We’re no strangers to leveraging that kind of resource, but it’s generally for data-driven services, like Twitter or Foursquare. It’s not too often that a visually rich system like Instagram comes along and releases an API. We wanted to do something that took advantage of the eye candy, something beyond a web-based photo browser – something to really showcase our friends’ grainy, bar room photography. A way we could sit with the photos and soak them in longer than usually allowed by the ephemeral, wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am approach taken by the feed in the Instagram iPhone app. Once those photos are out of your friends’ feed, they’re sort of gone, never to be seen again without some digging on your part. So we decided on an old fashioned screen saver, a medium that doesn’t get much love these days.

On to the geek stuff: We built it with OpenGL using our favorite creative coding tool, Cinder. It was an interesting development experience. We probably spent only 10% of the whole build time on the screen saver functionality itself, such as the visuals or the web services to download the photos. The rest was all screen saver infrastructure work, and that took some time. The Snow Leopard screen saver engine is a cantankerous beast, known for its flakiness, and wrapping OpenGL with it was a challenge. All manner of surprises cropped up: The NVIDEA GeForce 330M graphics chip on some MacBooks hates a certain kind of anti-aliasing when performed in conjunction with a screen saver (thanks to Andy Berg for letting me crash his laptop a thousand times). The screen saver engine itself gets confused when you toggle between full screen mode and preview mode. The list goes on. OpenGL is tricky enough, but wrapped up in the crazy person strait jacket of the screen saver engine was something else.

But here it is! Have a test run, and let us know how it works for you.