Oh my GAWD I love my Mac! I found this app that allows you to use OSX’s Quartz and Core Image rendering engines to use these Quartz Compositions as your desktop background. From the site: “Quartz Compositions are screensaver-like files that can include rich data sources and render them using all the features of Quartz Extreme and Core Image.”
This one shows LIVE-UPDATING views of Earth’s cloudcover from space! Your view slowly rotates around the planet. I’m in love with it! I downloaded a bunch of them and they look so amazing! If you don’t know, OSX is all vector-based, so everything can scale perfectly with no loss of quality. Everything just looks so damn slick! OSX (and this app by proxy) is SO cool!
Check out the application.
Check out the Quartz plugins.