Big Pixels

Big Pixels is a unique screensaver that prioritizes the main objective of a screensaver: protecting your screen from prolonged display of the same image for extended periods. This program capitalizes on the idea of filling the screen with a color and changing it periodically to prevent pixel burnout on LCD and plasma monitors. The screensaver comes in handy since some users might forget to turn off the monitor when not in use.

However, some screensavers do not cycle all pixels through various colors. For example, screensavers such as "Pop art squares" have black borders that remain static, causing flickers that might not be pleasant to look at. To avoid this, the Big Pixels screensaver is designed to fill the screen with one color and repaint it randomly at reasonable intervals. Besides, the fill changes smoothly to avoid abrupt flickers.

To maintain aesthetics, the program increases the number of colors by dividing the screen into quadrants, each smoothly changing to the next. To add some variation, the number of quadrants changes randomly without causing flickers. The transition is seamless since all quadrants smoothly arrive at one color before altering the number of quadrants, giving an impressive display.

Finally, to compile the program, you can use the command: gcc -pedantic -Wall -Wunreachable-code -Wextra -O3 -o main main.c `pkg-config --libs --cflags gtk+-2.0 gthread-2.0`. However, note that the -O3 switch optimizes the program heavily, leading to some warnings like `warning: will never be executed` in `main.c`.