Pablo Fernandez

Since discontinuing Screensaver Ninja, I have received many messages asking when it is coming back: over Twitter, Facebook, email, and even one person tracking me down on Reddit..

For those of you who don’t know what Screensaver Ninja is, here is the old explainer video:

It has been very painful to read these messages for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I strongly believe in the product. I want to have it; use it; and enable others to use it. I constantly see expensive and badly designed dashboards or wasted screens, which my product will address. Secondly, judging by the requests, other people want this just as much as I do. Not proceeding with Screensaver ninja could be a wasted business opportunity; although it is hard to tell if the demand is enough to support its development right now.

I set up a landing page explaining what happened to Screensaver Ninja and a form for people to register for notifications of its potential comeback. This was a way to save everybody’s time and frustration; for those emailing requests for up to date information when I could only say, with sadness, “it’s over”. To my surprise, this form has been gathering five or so leads a week, which is rather a lot for an abandoned product.

I have started playing with the idea that I might revive Ninja: This time I have designed a bigger system that covers many more use cases and allows me to support both Windows and Mac OS as well as other platforms just as easily.

During this process I identified the technological bottlenecks; the aspects to product creation that can take months to negotiate and solve, such as hacking Apple’s cookie jar or packaging Chromium. In doing so, I have built a selection of prototypes testing my choices – and everything is working beautifully.

So that’s it: I have decided to revive Screensaver Ninja. I have emailed all of you whom have shown interest to tell you the good news, and have received an overwhelmingly positive response from both individuals and corporations; some wanting to run hundreds of instances.

I want to be completely transparent with my supporters; I am building Screensaver Ninja by myself in my spare time between long days and after hours work at two different consultant gigs. Whilst I am looking into the options of partnerships, developers, and marketers, I have decided not to wait for these additions to the team in order to make progress. I’m very excited about this phase both from the technical as well as the business points of view so Screensaver Ninja is moving forward and I will have frequent updates.