Microsoft’s upcoming operating system Windows 8 will improve that by offering to sync the primary desktop background color with the operating system’s Aero interface color.

Under Windows 7, Aero and the wallpaper color can be completely different, which may be a issue for users who like to see matching colors on their desktop.

Aero Adjuster now is a program for Windows that users can run to adjust the Aero color automatically whenever the background changes.

All you actually need to do is to download and unpack the program on your computer system. Once done you can run it with a double-click on the single executable file.

The program will modify the Aero color from that moment on to match the color of the desktop background. This is an automatic process that requires no user interaction.

Please note that the Aero color is changed permanently. Aero Adjuster will not automatically switch back to the default color if you close the application. You do however have an option to restore the old Aero color from the application’s system tray menu.

The core question with programs like Aero Adjuster is this: Do you want to run an additional program in the background for better matching Aero and wallpaper colors? The program does not use a lot of cpu cycles when it is running, but its memory usage can go as high as 15 Megabytes.

I have reviewed a similar program called Aero Blend in the past which offers a similar functionality.

Windows users can download Aero Adjuster from the developer’s Deviant Art page. The software is compatible with 32-bit and 64-bit editions of the Microsoft Windows operating system. (via)

The program combines wallpaper downloading with shuffling in an easy to use interface. Yet Another Wallpaper Downloader can download wallpaper images from the following repositories: Bing, Ewallpapers, InterfaceLIFT, reWalls, Skins.be, The Randomizer and wallBase.

Here is how it works. You can start YAWD after you have unpacked the archive on your system. It is a .NET 4.0 application which means that you need to have installed the Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0 on your system.

Only a program icon in the Windows system tray is displayed on startup. Right-click the icon and select Open to bring up the main interface.

I suggest you start with a click on Options > Preferences for the initial program configuration. Here you define the download directory for all wallpapers, the interval in which the background images are changed as well as auto updating and autostart settings.

You can now download wallpapers from one of the wallpaper sites listed in the main interface. The Get All button downloads all available wallpapers from the site, the Update button checks for updates and downloads only those to the system. Users who want to download all wallpapers from all hosting sites need to right-click the system tray icon and select Download Wallpaper to do that. Please note that the first initial download will take a long time, even if you are on a very fast connection. You also need enough free space on your hard drive. I managed to download 2 Gigabytes of wallpaper images in less than 30 minutes on my computer, and the program was not even half-way through the download process.

YAWD create a folder for every wallpaper site on your system. Individual wallpapers can be excluded from the rotation, deleted or manually set as the system’s desktop background.

New users may also need to configure all wallpaper folders under Options > Manage Selection Folder. Here it is possible to add one or multiple folders with wallpaper images to include them in the background rotation.

I’d love to see a few feature additions in future versions. This would include the ability to add resolution limits to dismiss low resolution backgrounds and a hotkey to switch the wallpaper image more comfortably.

All in all it is a solid program that shows great promise, especially if the developer continues to work on it.

Windows users can download Yet Another Wallpaper Downloader from the project website over at Codeplex.

Pulse looks on first glance like any other wallpaper changer that pulls desktop backgrounds from Internet wallpaper repositories. Unlike other programs of its kind however, it uses a different methodology to pick them.

Most programs that download and display online images give you a category at best that you can pick, like cars, nature or celebrities. Pulse adds nuances to it, by allowing you to specify a keyword. The program then tries to pull only wallpaper images from the online repositories that relate to the selected keyword.

Pulse supports two different online wallpaper sources currently, Wallbase and Rewalls. It is unfortunately only possible to pick one of the two, and it is therefor a good idea to visit those sites to look at their wallpapers before making that choice.

All pictures are downloaded automatically. The wallpaper changer is set to change desktop backgrounds every 20 minutes. The interval can be changed in the options, from every minute to a maximum of every 90 minutes.

Additional options are provided in the program settings. It is possible to skip low resolution pictures automatically, get only pictures with a maximum available resolution and to set the wallpapers as the logon background.

Old pictures are deleted after three days automatically. The interval can be changed as well to delete the pictures earlier or later. Users who want to keep the desktop backgrounds can uncheck the option to delete old pictures.

The free desktop backgrounds changer Pulse works only under Windows Vista and Windows 7. It requires the Microsoft .Net Framework 3.5 to be installed on the system. Users who meet the system requirements can download the program from the official project website at Codeplex.

The free portable application Overlap Wallpaper offers one of the easiest options to add a second image to the active desktop wallpaper. The basic idea of the developer was to give users an option to add a smaller photo of their loved ones, or something that they hold dear on the monitor without affecting the active wallpaper image. The second image at the same time will display even if the primary wallpaper changes, for instance if a desktop wallpaper changer runs in the background.

Just download and unpack Overlap Wallpaper on the computer system. The program will automatically minimize itself after startup, so that only an icon remains in the system tray. Right-click the icon there and select the Settings entry from the context menu. The configuration screen opens up, which looks like this:

Click on browse to pick an image from the local computer system. This image is then added on top of the existing desktop background. You can alternatively copy and paste an image with its full path into the form directly.

The photo size sets the dimensions of the image in pixels. The image height and width will automatically be reduced if a smaller size is entered on the configuration screen. You can use -1 to use the actual image size. It is theoretically possible to display two wallpapers at once on the screen that both fit the full screen. The transparency of the overlapping image needs to be selected accordingly so that both images are shown on the screen.

The photo position fields determine the location of the photo on the screen. You may need to experiment with different values here to position it correctly on the existing desktop background. Just think of the desktop as a series of dots that equal the screen resolution, for instance 1920×1200. If you wanted to place the photo at the top right location you would select an x position value of about 1820 and an y position value of 10. If the image is larger, you may need to reduce the x position value so that it fits on the screen.

Click apply after making changes to save them. It takes some time before the changes become visible on the screen.

Overlap Wallpaper is an interesting program, handy for users who want to display a photo or image on the screen at all times. It does not have to be a photo of loved ones or something that they hold dear, it can also be an image with important textual information.

Overlap Wallpaper is compatible with all recent 32-bit and 64-bit editions of the Microsoft Windows operating system. It worked fine on a 64-bit Windows 7 Pro test system. Downloads are provided at the developer’s website over at Google Code.

Soon thereafter alternatives like DreamRender became available that offered the functionality for all Windows operating systems.

Microsoft has made the decision not to distribute Dreamscene with their new operating system Windows 7. Thanks to the Windows 7 Dreamscene Activator it is now possible to enable Dreamscene in Windows 7 to use videos as desktop backgrounds.

The portable program is compatible with both 32-bit and 64-bit editions of the Windows 7 operating system. It will display two buttons in its interface to enable or disable DreamScene in Windows 7.

The program needs to be executed with elevated rights. A click on the enable DreamScene button will copy files to Windows system directory and add entries to the Windows Registry.

The tool will first copy DreamScene.dll to %WinDir%\System32 & DreamScene.dll.mui to %WinDir%\System32\en-US.

The Explorer process will be restarted afterwards to load the changes and offer the functionality right away.

DreamScene should now be active on the user’s system. Videos can now be added as desktop backgrounds by right-clicking them and selecting to set them as the desktop background.

Dreamscene videos can also be found at Deviant Art

Windows 7 DreamScene Activator can be downloaded from The Windows Club website.

Now I will preface this article by saying the developer has ceased development of Wallpapoz (he did so in 2008.) Even though it is no longer in development, Wallpapoz still works just fine. And I am sure at some point some one will pick up development of the application. But until then, Wallpapoz is a cool app that helps make your desktop even better.

Getting and installing

Most likely Wallpapoz is in your distributions’ repository, so installation is accomplished as simply as issuing a command like:

yum install wallpapoz

or

sudo apt-get install wallpapoz

There might be dependency issues which will be dictated by which release you are using. If apt-get or yum do not pick up the dependencies you might have to install them manually like so:

sudo apt-get install python-gnome2 python-imaging python-gtk2

or

yum install python-gnome2 python-imaging python-gtk2

You probably won’t have to resolve those dependencies manually, but it’s nice to know how just in case.

Once Wallpapoz is installed you are ready to fire it up.

Running and configuring

To start up Wallpapoz you can click on the GNOME Applications menu and then the Accessories sub-menu. Inside of the Accessories sub-menu you will find the Wallpapoz entry. Click on that to start up the application.

Figure 1

When you start up Wallpapoz you should find the interface fairly straight forward. Figure 1 shows a very clean, user-friendly GUI that allows you to configure wallpaper for four workspaces.

The first thing you will want to do is select a workspace and then either click the Add Files button (to add single or multiple files) or click the Add Directory button (to add a directory of images.)

When you click either the Add Files or Add Directory button a Select File window will open. Navigate to the loctation of your image files and select the wallpaper(s) you want to use. You can select multiple files by clicking and holding the Ctrl key as you select the file.

After you have added the files you can then configure some options. To do this click the Preferences button. There are four options to configure:

• Change desktop wallpaper after a pre-configured time.
• Pick wallpaper in random order.
• Change desktop wallpaper when changing workspace.
• Style (Scaled, Centered, Fill Screen, Zoom, Tiled)

Once you have made your preference changes click the OK button to get rid of that window. Now click the Save button and then click the Restart button to restart the daemon (to ensure the changes take effect.)

Now your wallpaper should start changing per your configuration.

Possible gotchas

Although I haven’t found report of this happening elsewhere I have discovered that when using Compiz with Wallpapoz can cause issue with the workspaces. If you rename workspaces in Wallpapoz, when using Compiz, your Wallpapoz configuration file can be corrupted. This file is in ~/.wallpapoz/wallpapoz.xml. If this happens you can issue the command:

rm -rf ~/.wallpapoz

to delete that file and start fresh.

Final thoughts

Wallpapoz is not perfect, but it can add a nice feature to your GNOME desktop that would require some handy scripting to do otherwise. Give Wallpapoz a try. If you like it, and you’re a developer, consider forking the application (or just request permission to take over development) so this tool can continue growing.

A third party alternative for Windows XP to Windows Dreamscene is XP Scene. It is an elegant solution that can turn videos into desktop backgrounds in three simple steps. It does so by creating a html file with an embedded Windows Media Player control that can be used as the background in Windows XP.

XP Scene is a portable application that can be run from any location. It displays all three steps of the process in the main interface.

• Step 1: Select the video that should be used as the desktop background. Supported are avi, mpg and wmv videos. The resize mode can also be changed from “keep input aspect ratio” to “stretch video to display size” in this step.
• Step 2: Selecting the output folder where the html file and video will be saved in.
• Step 3: Starting the conversion

Once the files have been created it is a matter of selecting the HTML file as the background wallpaper. This is done in Display Properties > Desktop > Background. The user has to browse to the location where the html file has been saved to and pick it from there.

The process itself demands quite a bit of computer memory and cpu. It can also be quite the distraction most of the time. The right-click menu to change the background again is not working because of the html file that is using all of the space on the desktop.

The only way to change the desktop background back is to go into the Windows Control Panel and select the Display configuration from there.