Despite being ridiculously busy lately I’ve managed to find some time to work on my beloved John’s Background Switcher. I was originally going to leave it for a bit then over the Summer work on version 4 with some wholesale changes and major improvements. Then I had a few ideas and started fixing bugs and implementing some of these ideas and thought I may as well spend a few weeks putting together an interim release (which I’ll call 3.4). I’ve been working on features like this effect:
[Originals t-l to b-r: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19]
One of the coolest features of the previous version was Snapshot Scrapbook mode that made your desktop look like you’d thrown a bunch of Polaroid snaps onto it. I’ve built on this by adding the option to change the size of each snap (meaning you can get more on your screen – which is much better it turns out). I’ve also added a new option I’ll call ‘Postcard’ mode – which you can see above (this one’s a selection of ‘Interesting’ photos from Flickr over the last 7 days). I think you’ll agree it’s a pretty slick effect and again you can change the size of each photo to decide how many photos you want on each screen. While I may not be getting the time to go out and take landscape photos just now, at least I’m able to write some software that lets me appreciate other people’s!
In a week or two (if you’re a Windows user – I promise one of these days I’ll write a Mac version) – you’ll be able to do the same!
Very cool John, good work! Now go and read about Cocoa programming.
I’m half way through it John, I swear I am! 😉
Excellent, but where is the Mac version, haven’t you finished that book yet…?
and I wouldn’t mind a version for the iPhone…
…and the Plasma…
Hi Paul! Unfortunately I changed jobs a few months back so have been immersed in getting up to speed with the technologies in the new one, thereby pushing back the order of books I’m reading. I’m on a WCF one just now and the Mac programming one will be right after that!
And unfortunately I don’t think the iPhone apps can do background processing so that may put the kibosh on that one…
excuses!
Ha ha! Tell me about it, I’ve got my priorities all wrong I know!
Great, great feature! Thanks a lot for your effort! I just love JBS. 🙂
It’s brilliant!
Wait, people actually use Macs? >:-)
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