Quickly change desktop background
Nov2
Saturday morning. Can of RedBull. Cocoa. And me. Came up with a simple idea to develop an app for quickly changing desktop background. Just drag an image on an app window and you’re done!
Had to google around for some tips and tricks. First results disappointed me much since they referenced usage of Carbon and AppleEvents. Oh yeah, and they were dated back to 2004 or so. Then one post here had what I needed: a ChangeBackground and a [private] notification.
After couple of hours of trial and error I came up with this application that you can download and try out. I think I’m going to work on this app a bit more so it’d become more decent product.
It’s so rough that I can’t guarantee it will work on your Mac. But here’s the requirements so far:
- Snow Leopard
Download and [try to] enjoy. Needless to say – I accept any feedback.
UPDATE: Perspx found a bug which I successfully reproduced and fixed. You can download updated version here.
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15:50 on November 8th, 2009
Great start, and I think it’s a brilliant idea especially with the drag and drop interface. However, I have some suggestions:
1) Have a history of dropped items which persist – sometimes when I get bored of a background I want to go to what I had previously and it’s annoying to go and find the image.
2) I like the drag and drop idea but it’s a bit awkward dragging it onto a window. I’m not sure what you could do about this – perhaps have another drag target, such as allowing dragging of the image onto the dock icon or something?
3) Have the option to have an icon in the menubar at the top of the screen? If you were to have a history of backgrounds you could even put this in a menu that is shown when the icon is clicked on.
As you say it’s just a start but a bit of food for thought ;)
16:19 on November 8th, 2009
1) I was considering this. Didn’t want to go big with the first release. But now I have the reason for implementing this
2/3) It might be cool to try this out.
Utility like this sould definitely be interface agent (menu bar icon or dock-style slider with trackable area). Dock icon IMHO is too much.