Hard-To-Find The Hills Screensaver — Get It Here
8:37 am, August 29th, 2008, Lonnie Lazar
The Hills screensaver is about the coolest screensaver I’ve seen for Mac OS X, but it’s not easy to get.
The screensaver shows beautifully rendered rolling green hills covered in perfectly-manicured grass. You fly over them as though gliding in a silent helicopter. It’s utterly hypnotic — and very relaxing, especially on a big display.
The developer, Chris Kent, was hosting it on a .mac account, but he exceeded bandwidth limits and it’s now gone.
Searching for it in Google brings up a bunch of old links — it’s very frustrating.
So we’re hosting the file here. Download The Hills version 1.1: hills-1-1.dmg.
Posted by Lonnie Lazar in Desktop Pictures, Macintosh, Software | Comment on this article
Wow! This is almost as cool as that “I’m flying through the stars” screensaver from days of old.
The only thing that could make it better is if maybe the hills had eyes, or it didn’t exist.
clicknathan, on August 29th, 2008 at 9:14 am
Link doesn’t work.
brad8989, on August 29th, 2008 at 6:26 pm
When i try to download The Hills, all I get is a page of text full of gobbledygook, like this: xs bb“âQ0C
any suggestions?
thank you.
mike/romania
mike ormsby, on August 30th, 2008 at 3:07 am
Great find, and many thanks for hosting the file! Btw: your mime-types on the server are wrong, the .dmg is registered as a html file.
Here are some action-style settings for the app that I came up with (faster, higher hills, you often just make it over a hill without crashing into it):
hills height: 8.88
speed: 50
look-ahead distance: 5.39
camera-height: 1.31
grid size: 256
fog density: 0.011
foc color: rgb 118 209 255
Solo, on August 30th, 2008 at 8:12 am
brad, mike: until Lonnie fixes the mime types, try this to download:
1. ctrl-click on the link, select “copy link”
2. open safari downloads window
3. press cmd-v to paste and start the download
4. once download is finished, rename the file in finder so that it ends with .dmg
Cheers!
Solo, on August 31st, 2008 at 3:06 am
Worked perfectly. Thanks!
brad8989, on August 31st, 2008 at 9:38 am
@Solo: Thanks for the heads up about the mime types. I’ve fixed it. There should be no problems downloading the file now.
And thanks also for the configuration tip. I tried your settings, but the high speed made me a bit nauseous on the big screen I have. I prefer the slower, gentler pace of the defaults..
Leander Kahney, on August 31st, 2008 at 11:54 am
[...] Download it here. [...]
The Hills Screensaver « MRod says:, on August 31st, 2008 at 8:01 pm
Thank you Solo, works great! Thou rockest. Mike
mike ormsby, on September 2nd, 2008 at 1:09 pm
Leander, yes i agree on the pace. Solo must be a jet pilot in real life. M
mike ormsby, on September 2nd, 2008 at 1:15 pm