Ramblings of a Coder's Mind

My new laptop is a work box and doesn’t inherit the obsessive compulsiveness of File naming and sorting that my desktop hard disks have. I have, for this reason, dumped all wallpapers which are applicable to be used with my desktop (wallpapers with aspect ratio 16:9) into my “My Pictures” folder. Randomly, I have an urge to change the wallpaper and I really don’t want to go select one. So I thought I should have something that would change my wallpaper to a random image. I tried finding something but most such applications were installables and would change the wallpapers after periodic time intervals, something i didn’t want.

Thus was born the Random Selection Wallpaper Changer (RSWC). An extremely simplistic, single exe application that does what is required.

Default Values:

• RSWC takes images (bmp, jpg, png) from the user’s My Pictures folder.
• It sets this image as your desktop wallpaper using stretched mode.

Pre-Requisite: A pre-requisite is that you have .NET 2.0 installed on your machine.

Future Plans: The exe is 416kb, something I wish to reduce. I might rewrite the code in C++ to get rid of the .NET dependency (despite Microsoft claiming .NET is common enough to no longer be a  “requirement” and even reduce the file size. Also, I might contemplate creating a light weight application to change wallpapers at regular time intervals as well. (People requesting for such things would certainly compel me. I’m not motivated to do this for personal usage :))

If someone requires it, I might work a way in to set the source folder and mode of setting the wallpaper and still keep it portable and single filed. I could write to registry but that isn’t really portable in my opinion. Ideas/Suggestions/Feedback/Advanced Critique is always welcome ;)

Known Limitation: Setting png wallpapers sets the desktop to a plain coloured background (your default background color) because Windows doesn’t support png wallpapers. It converts pngs into jpgs and then applies them and I shall do the same in the next update.

Download: Random Selection Wallpaper Changer (RSWC) v1.00 (416 KB)

Its been a long road going through the SDI National Finals where we came second, going to IIM-A where we got project incubation and then finally to the World Finals where we won the interoperability award. Along the way, we made lots of new friends and learned a whole lot more.

Here are a few related posts on my blog: Imagine Cup 2008 World Finals and Imagine Cup 2008 Gallery. Be sure to check out the latter post which has never before seen footage.

Another announcement to be made is that the development for my custom CMS j@x has been put to halt indefinitely due to shortage of time. As have a few other projects like Scribble Scrabble. Some of them, I’ve signed over control to other AXIS members while others (like PHPIRCBot) shall be released in their current state. This decision had to be made considering my schedule over the past year only keeps getting busier and busier.

Next month, I’ll make sure I tell the world about a few products I have under development and others I have ready in my garage ;) The releases include DarkLight, PHPIRCBot and a brand new CountPrime.