Choosing colours and blobs for the Lava lamp screensaver

Few things are as easy to stare at as a lava lamp. Soft blobs of warm wax rise, stretch, merge and sink again, and nothing ever quite repeats. Lava lamp in Screensavers by Zaweba brings that slow movement to an idle screen, drawn by the app's own code, with three settings that change its mood.

It is one of the calmest screensavers in the classic pack. That makes it a good default for a home PC, a bedroom monitor or anywhere you'd rather the screen soothed than entertained.

Four colour schemes

Colours offers four choices. Sunset orange is the classic look, warm wax glowing against a darker background, the one most people picture when they think of a lava lamp. Deep teal is cooler and quieter, and suits a modern office or a room with blue or grey decor. Violet night is darker and moodier, a good fit for evenings. Lime and blue is the brightest and most playful of the four, closer to a party lamp.

Pick the scheme to suit the room as much as your taste. A warm scheme makes a room feel cosier in the evening. A cooler one looks tidier on a desk in daylight. The live preview in the manager changes the moment you pick a new scheme, so you can flick between all four in a few seconds.

How many blobs, how fast

Number of blobs runs from 3 to 12. With three, each blob has room to wander and the merges are rare, so you watch single shapes drift up and down. With twelve, they meet and join all the time, and the screen becomes a busy, ever-changing mass of colour.

Speed runs from 1 to 10. Lava lamps are meant to be slow, and the lower end of the scale captures that best. A higher speed is fun for a while and can suit a lime and blue scheme at a party, but for most uses a speed of two or three, with a middling number of blobs, gives the gentle drift people expect.

The two settings work together. Many blobs at a high speed can look like boiling soup. Few blobs at a low speed can look nearly still. Somewhere between, the blobs stay apart long enough to have shapes of their own and then merge often enough to keep you watching.

Where Lava lamp fits

Lava lamp is a natural choice for a screen that will be idle for long spells and seen from a distance, because the movement is soft and there are no sudden flashes. It also pairs well with the other calm scenes in the app, such as Aquarium and Rain on glass. Tick all three in Install several and you get one screensaver that picks one of them at random each time the PC goes idle.

If you have more than one monitor, choose between a lamp on each screen, one wide lamp stretched across them, or the main monitor only with the others black. A lamp on each screen looks like a pair of lamps on a shelf, while a stretched one becomes a single tall, wide column of wax.

Setting it and checking it

Once the preview looks right, try Preview full screen to judge the speed at full size, since slow movement looks faster on a large display. Moving the mouse or pressing a key closes it. Then Use this screensaver builds it into your profile, with no administrator rights needed, and opens Windows' Screen Saver Settings so you can choose how long to wait.

Because settings are read when the screensaver starts, changing the colours later needs no rebuild. If you want to start again from the original look, Reset to defaults puts every setting back.

Small things that make a difference

Don't choose the speed from the small preview alone. Don't crowd the lamp with twelve blobs on a small laptop screen, where there's no room for them to separate. And on a laptop, remember the battery saver in Install and options, which turns the screen black below a chosen charge rather than keep the lamp glowing.