Brian 2006-10-14 22:30
Here are some reasons why a Wallpaper slide show would be awesome. This applies to the UltraMon Wallpaper Feature and also to the Video Saver. Maybe with some transitions (like Fade / Dissolve) and some control over the transition period.
1) Videos rarely match the correct aspect ratio of my monitors. 2 of my monitors are rotated by 90 degrees. It is pretty easy to crop a few images to make them fit each monitor.
2) I have so many cool background images that I would like to run a slide show with. Like high quality nature photos at 1900 x 1600. It is difficult to find/import quality Videos to use.
3) It would take less CPU to render compared to video. Sometimes I leave my computer alone while it is rendering 3D stuff... and the render times are slowed down when the Video saver is outputting to 3 monitors.
4) If a Wallpaper slide show is constantly running in the background... it could bring me some extra tranquility if my active application is not maximized. Video Saver is an "all or nothing" type of thing.
Brian
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Christian Studer 2006-10-16 08:44
Thanks for the suggestion, will be considered for UltraMon 3.
You could already do this with a custom script, ChangeWallpaperAuto.
Please note that you would need to create each wallpaper manually though.
Christian Studer - www.realtimesoft.com
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Brian 2006-10-17 16:28
Thanks for the tip. That script was almost what I had in mind. However I would like the transitions to happen more rapidly with a fading effect. The problem with the VB script is that after it updates the registry and refreshes Ultromon... the screen flickers.
If I can give a suggestion for the future Ultramon... I think technologically (and potentially) speaking you would be best off to apply a "Flash Wallpaper" to the background instead of programming your own solution from scratch. It is fairly trivial to output a slide show from a set of photos. I use MING (which is open source) for dynamic Flash generation. I am not sure how to get the Windows wallpaper to display a flash file... but there are a lot of other software packages doing it already, so it is possible of course.
Also you may be able to add more powerful features to the users Desktop from utlramon using Flash Action-script. You could for example have the user's Wallpaper display the weather forecast through Accuweather or show News headlines from RSS feeds. Their desktop could be linkable to web pages. Might be interesting since the Desktop is the first thing people see when they turn on their computer (and may want different monitors to have different features). Maybe it could be another revenue source too?
Anyway, I know that last paragraph is a little bit "out there" but it is an argument why Flash technology would be a good choice for the Wallpaper slide show in a future Ultramon release.
Brian
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