Friday, January 18, 2008

Cover-art Wallpaper under Ubuntu

This is an update to the previous post to create a cover art "stack" for Windows XP wallpaper to generate and update the wallpaper in Ubuntu.

Not much had to change, except the setWallpaper function:

def setWallpaper( bmp ):
    os.system( "gconftool-2 -t string -s /desktop/gnome/background/picture_filename %s" % bmp.replace(" ","\\ ") )

5 comments:

Will Price said...

wow thats awesome i would love to be able to do that in windows

Tom said...

This was actually an update for Ubuntu of the windows version.

Will Price said...

thanks tom may have a little bash at having a go at this its great but all my album art is in jpegs normally

Tom said...

It is only the final desktop wallpaper image that has to be in BMP format for windows to accept it. The cover art images (or photos or whatever) can be in any format that the Python Imaging Library (PIL) understands, which is pretty much everything (GIF, JPG, BMP, PNG, TIF, ...)

richardh9935 said...

I know this is "old", etc, but.... given the way many people strew paper around their desks, generally appear quite disorganised, but still claim to know where everything is, I think you have hit the nail on the head for a really new way to arrange documents on the Desktop.

Currently, they're arranged in neat cartesian grids. I suspect many users just don't understand that organisation, find it totally unnatural, and build inhibitions that prevent them from using their computer systems.

Your random layering overcomes that. It presents documents in layers, which happens to be the same way under-five-year-olds create pictures. They draw one picture, then the next goes directly on top.

Obviously it looks messy to me, too, but it's a good metaphor for what these people actually do on their physical desks.

Colouring the pages and putting an icon on each page, like a "secret pencil tag", would help, too.

Maybe this could work for a browser.