I did it--auto change vista wallpaper with fade transition

[willywonka]

I saw that OS X could change wallpaper at an interval with a nice fade transition that blends in the next wallpaper. Pretty cool. I wanted one for vista, and with dreamscene and aero and all that's gotta be easy, right?

WRONG. It turns out, upon searches and searches, google, winmatrix, aquasoft, neowin, all have me running around in circle, and for a while I didn't get anywhere. I found plenty of posts by other people looking for the same thing, though, but with no conclusion.

So I wanted to put this here for other people like me that may be looking to "automatically change windows vista wallpaper with fade transition" (that's for the search bot :) ). And it's amazingly simple, but it has limitations, because it's a "workaround".

1. Either use vista's default Photo screensaver and set it up like you want

OR

1a. Download this http://www.cs.ucr.edu/~gstitt/motionpicture/ . The advantage to this app is that you have more control on the image time (6-60 sec) and crossfade speed. The vista's default Photo screensaver is simple and has limited options, but it comes with a nice set of different transitions.

2. Follow this http://www.istartedsomething.com/20061004/...desktop-aurora/

3. You're done :) Make sure to download a bunch of subtle, abstract wallpapers with color variation.

Limitations that I found:

-max time I can display an image is 60sec, due to the screensaver's limitation. wtf? I want 600 sec. How do I do that?

-no icons on desktop. This is due to the workaround limitation. Doesnt matter to me--I dont use desktop icons. Sidebar works though :)

-If you use the automatic exe in step 2, you might find that the taskbar doesn't have transparency. You solve this by running the manual method. I dunno why.

Have fun :)

[(Spork)]

nice to see lazy people get ever lazier

[Mugwump00]

nice to see lazy people get ever lazier

??!

Great SS!

Just need a way to get "Program Manager" window-handle in a scriptable way...?

... or how to get AnimatedDesktop.exe (or something like it) to display under the taskbar/sidebar...?

[willywonka]

nice to see lazy people get ever lazier

pretty cool, uh? :)

??!

Great SS!

Just need a way to get "Program Manager" window-handle in a scriptable way...?

... or how to get AnimatedDesktop.exe (or something like it) to display under the taskbar/sidebar...?

yea I'm trying to figure that out in my "spare" time

[rec_kris]

nice to see lazy people get ever lazier

+1 post count, good work.

I've literally been searching for this for years! Awesome job, even though it's a workaround, it's still money.

If I've ever wanted anything from a mac, it's been this little feature.

[42n81]

http://awc.smurphy.co.uk/

[willywonka]

http://awc.smurphy.co.uk/

does it support fading/smooth transition?

didnt think so :)

[Mugwump00]

I'm having the motionpicture SS-as-a-WP bomb-out whenever I lock my desktop, or another SS kicks in - anyone else? I'm running X64.

:(

Standard Vista SS's seem to be stable...

[Angel Blue01]

Thanks!

[jimbo11883]

I'm working on something that may even be better, although it will only be a proof of concept... before I can improve some parts of the demo... then I'll integrate the feature into NeoPaper, a wallpaper manager I am working on.

[jimbo11883]

Well, here's what I came up with so far...

Usage is simple. Choose two wallpapers, and then click the generate button. When generation is finished, click the fade button.

Screen Shot:

Known issues:

1. Generating the frames of animation for the fade effect is very slow... It would be better if it can be done realtime, but working on full screen sized images is resource intensive.

2. When fading between wallpapers, the desktop icons are hidden, if they were previously visible to start with. For users that hide their desktop icons, this wouldn't be a problem. The icons will come back after the fade transition ends, though. The problem here is that I can't find a way to tell SHELLDLL_DefView and SysListView32 to refresh and show what was painted on Progman.

3. Obvious high CPU usage because of what is being done.

If anyone has a solution to these two issues, I'd love to know. This feature will make it into my NeoPaper wallpaper manager software if I can get it done properly. :)

Download:

FadeWallpaper.zip

[JedOs86]

danm, fading wallpaper, thats more useless than Dreamscape. I mean really maybe 20% of the time youre using your computer yoour looking at the desktop, and even then youre not even paying attention to its wallpaper.

[jimbo11883]

That's true, but it was a fun technical challenge, IMO.

[willywonka]

danm, fading wallpaper, thats more useless than Dreamscape. I mean really maybe 20% of the time youre using your computer yoour looking at the desktop, and even then youre not even paying attention to its wallpaper.

thats like saying "damn, aero glass, thats more useless than... I mean really maybe 20% of the time youre using your computer youre looking at the aero glass"

or "damn, themed-GUI, thats more useless than... I mean really maybe 20% of the time youre using your computer youre looking at the GUI"

some people care about wallpaper more than others :)

And since it's a feature in os x, i gotta have it ;)

ANYWAY, I found that you can make a simple .bat script with notepad to launch the wallpaper like this

c:\windows\system32\motionpicture.scr /p *

where * is your handler, so mine looks like this

c:\windows\system32\motionpicture.scr /p 65744

just type that in notepad and save as .bat, using the proper handler you got from SPYXX and hex-binary conversion. Then you can launch wallpaper by just clicking on the script, WITH proper taskbar transparency. This script will work as long as windows doesnt change the handler on restart, etc.

So far it only closes when I launch games like world in conflict, but relaunching it isnt really a problem.

And I REALLY want to change the rotation to more than 60sec. :-/

[Mugwump00]

"This script will work as long as windows doesnt change the handler on restart, etc."

precisely... :s

[willywonka]

"This script will work as long as windows doesnt change the handler on restart, etc."

precisely... :s

... since making this thread windows only changed the handler once, out of a number of starts.

[Mugwump00]

Ok, so "John's Background Switcher" was causing the window handle to change - d'oh :)

MotionScreensaver still crashes when the desktop is locked, on x64.

Anyone know of another nice-transition low-resource photo-library screensaver?

tx