Wallpaper Cycler 1.4 Released

[ExaWare]

Wallpaper Cycler 1.4 has been released. Check it out at:
http://www.esat.kuleuven.ac.be/~mgregoir/WallpaperCycler.htm

Wallpaper Cycler is an easy to use program to get rid of that boring static
wallpaper on your Windows desktop. You can easily select several images and
they will be displayed one after the other or in random order with a
specified delay. You can let it startup at Windows logon. It can also be
configured so it changes the wallpaper once at Windows logon.

Version 1.4 Changelog:
* Shuffling should work beter now.
* Paths in the .WCL files can now be relative.
* The fullscreen/small-preview was rather blocky when scaling images.
* The sort-headers in the wallpaper list are now enabled.
* You can now "pick" a color from a picture to use as background color for
that picture.
* Wallpaper Cycler now remembers it's position (also if it's not on the
primary monitor)
* The drop-down color selectors now work when Wallpaper Cycler is not on the
primary monitor.
* Fixed a crash that sometimes occured with the color selectors.
* Colorpickers are now multi-monitor and XP theme aware.
* Added a "Full Filename" box to the information frame.

 

[rdt]

Wallpaper Cycler 1.4 has been released. Check it out at:
http://www.esat.kuleuven.ac.be/~mgregoir/WallpaperCycler.htm

Wallpaper Cycler is an easy to use program to get rid of that boring static
wallpaper on your Windows desktop. You can easily select several images and
they will be displayed one after the other or in random order with a
specified delay. You can let it startup at Windows logon. It can also be
configured so it changes the wallpaper once at Windows logon.

Version 1.4 Changelog:
* Shuffling should work beter now.
* Paths in the .WCL files can now be relative.
* The fullscreen/small-preview was rather blocky when scaling images.
* The sort-headers in the wallpaper list are now enabled.
* You can now "pick" a color from a picture to use as background color for
that picture.
* Wallpaper Cycler now remembers it's position (also if it's not on the
primary monitor)
* The drop-down color selectors now work when Wallpaper Cycler is not on the
primary monitor.
* Fixed a crash that sometimes occured with the color selectors.
* Colorpickers are now multi-monitor and XP theme aware.
* Added a "Full Filename" box to the information frame.

How could is the shuffling most wallpaper changers can't handle 20 +
images, certain wallpapers always seem to get picked out.

 

[ExaWare]

How could is the shuffling most wallpaper changers can't handle 20 +
images, certain wallpapers always seem to get picked out.

Euh, I don't really understand your statement. Could you please clarify. Has
it something to do with Wallpaper Cycler?

 

[OgO]

In alt.comp.freeware, on 13 Aug 2003, ExaWare announced:

Euh, I don't really understand your statement. Could you
please clarify. Has it something to do with Wallpaper
Cycler?

I think the question means - how well does does Wallpaper Cycler
work with large amounts of images? Many wallpaper shuffling
programs, when given more than say 20 images to choose from,
always seem to favour a handful of them and some never get picked
at all.

This is something I'd be interested in too - I have many hundreds
of images I like to cycle through as wallpapers but tend to only
get a few repeating.

Regards

OgO

 

[rdt]

A major problem is that the program has problems reading certain jpg
files and this error msg of : "one extra erroneous bit after #..." comes
up when ever the program starts and an image list is loaded. Its is very
annoying.

Anyway the randomness seem to to be fine. But the above makes it useless
for me to use the program.









ExaWare wrote:

 

[ExaWare]

In alt.comp.freeware, on 13 Aug 2003, ExaWare announced:


I think the question means - how well does does Wallpaper Cycler
work with large amounts of images? Many wallpaper shuffling
programs, when given more than say 20 images to choose from,
always seem to favour a handful of them and some never get picked
at all.

This is something I'd be interested in too - I have many hundreds
of images I like to cycle through as wallpapers but tend to only
get a few repeating.

The previous version of Wallpaper Cycler also had this kind of problems, BUT
since version 1.4 the randomizer should work a lot better now. Please give
it a try and let me know.
Nevertheless, i'm already thinking of tweaking the randomizer even further
up to the point that all wallpapers in the list will be randomly chosen
before a wallpaper is chosen that has already been displayed. That will be
something for the next release.

 

[OgO]

In alt.comp.freeware, on 13 Aug 2003, ExaWare announced:

...i'm already thinking of tweaking the
randomizer even further up to the point that all wallpapers
in the list will be randomly chosen before a wallpaper is
chosen that has already been displayed. That will be
something for the next release.

I like that idea. You do put all the wallpapers in so that you
will see them all, so I like the idea of randomly showing them
until they have all been displayed and then starting again (not
in the same order).

Personally, I haven't found any of the programs I've come across
to suit me, I'll explain what I currently do and that might
explain why:

I often download new pictures and I don't like having to manually
'add' each one to a wallpaper program individually.

I store all pictures of similar things together - ones I like to
use as wallpapers are designated by name - eg "my car
wallpaper.jpg" would be a wallpaper file but "my car.jpg" would
not be (*wallpaper.jpg = wallpaper for instance)

I pass all of the file masks (eg, c:\pictures\cars\*wallpaper.*
is one mask, c:\pictures\photos\*wallpaper.* is another) to a
program I wrote which chooses one file from all of the files that
match the given file masks, and makes that the windows background
- I run this program from my autoexec.bat file so it changes once
every reboot, which is enough for me, and is always up to date
with all the pictures - the downside of course is that it takes
about 5-10 seconds during bootup, it doesn't usually worry me
since I turn the computer on, make a cuppa and come back to it
all booted, but still....

Anyway, just thought I'd share that with you all. If anyone else
has thoughts on wallpapers it might make an interesting thread -
what do you use as wallpapers for instance? Personally I mostly
use pictures of cars, but also a few of other things like trains,
my pets and other photo's, nice background images I have found of
various things, pictures of my home city, melbourne and country
Australia, space... that just about covers it really.

Regards

OgO

 

[ExaWare]

In alt.comp.freeware, on 13 Aug 2003, ExaWare announced:


I like that idea. You do put all the wallpapers in so that you
will see them all, so I like the idea of randomly showing them
until they have all been displayed and then starting again (not
in the same order).

Well it will be implemented in the next release

For now, i've checked the randomness of Wallpaper Cycler 1.4. The results
are as follows:
- I made a wallpaper list of 228 wallpapers in wallpaper cycler 1.4
- Switched on "shuffling"
- let the program cycle 10000 times, meaning the wallpaper is changed 10000
times in a row.
- extracted the data, and did some histogram analysis on it.
- The resulting histogram can be found at:
http://www.esat.kuleuven.ac.be/~mgregoir/images/WallpaperCycler/random_goodn
ess.gif
The horizontal axe displays the wallpapers from 0...227 -> 228 wallpapers
The vertical axe displays the frequency that each wallpaper has been
choosen.
The total number of iterations are 10000 chosen wallpapers.
The graph clearly indicates that almost all wallpapers are chosen. But the
current method does not garantee that all wallpapers in the list will be
randomly chosen before a wallpaper is chosen that has already been
displayed. But the next release will

Personally, I haven't found any of the programs I've come across
to suit me, I'll explain what I currently do and that might
explain why:

I often download new pictures and I don't like having to manually
'add' each one to a wallpaper program individually.

I store all pictures of similar things together - ones I like to
use as wallpapers are designated by name - eg "my car
wallpaper.jpg" would be a wallpaper file but "my car.jpg" would
not be (*wallpaper.jpg = wallpaper for instance)

I pass all of the file masks (eg, c:\pictures\cars\*wallpaper.*
is one mask, c:\pictures\photos\*wallpaper.* is another) to a
program I wrote which chooses one file from all of the files that
match the given file masks, and makes that the windows background
- I run this program from my autoexec.bat file so it changes once
every reboot, which is enough for me, and is always up to date
with all the pictures - the downside of course is that it takes
about 5-10 seconds during bootup, it doesn't usually worry me
since I turn the computer on, make a cuppa and come back to it
all booted, but still....

Anyway, just thought I'd share that with you all. If anyone else
has thoughts on wallpapers it might make an interesting thread -
what do you use as wallpapers for instance? Personally I mostly
use pictures of cars, but also a few of other things like trains,
my pets and other photo's, nice background images I have found of
various things, pictures of my home city, melbourne and country
Australia, space... that just about covers it really.

My wallpaper list currently contains:
- a lot of cars,
- nature pics,
- animals -> mostly kittens
- wallpapers from TV-series/films like Dark Angel, Matrix...


Features i'm currently thinking of implementing for some next release:
- Wallpaper cycler categories: so you can make a category cars, nature, ...
- True multimonitor support, meaning: you can put different wallpapers on
each screen.
(but this feature is for version 2.0 or something)