As discussed yesterday, I’ve retaken the reigns on Object Desktop after a 3 year absence. And the team has some very cool stuff that is now coming together in rapid fashion.
Today I’m going to talk about something that I think is a pretty big deal: DeskScapes 3.
For those of you not familiar with DeskScapes, it is a program that applies animated wallpaper. It’s effectively the only animated wallpaper program available for users of XP, Vista, and Windows 7.
One of the first changes I wanted to see made to DeskScapes as part of the “new regime” is for it to be a lot more practical. I like animated wallpaper as much as the next person, which means I’ll load it up for a bit, check it out, and slowly get tired of it like any wallpaper. But what we really wanted to see with DeskScapes 3 is for it to be even more useful to a wider population.
DeskScapes 3 (v2.91 beta) will be going out tomorrow for Object Desktop users. What’s in it that’s new?
Well the most obvious new thing is the support for your existing static wallpapers. But more importantly, that you can now apply the same kinds of effects to your existing wallpapers that you could once only apply to Dreams.
In the above example, I’ve taken a very colorful image and applied a Sepia filter to it in order to make (for me) a better background.
The new DeskScapes beta also introduces a pretty big new technology that has been discussed previously but now we’ve actually finally got it together: Hybrid Dreams
The idea is to make it so that people can take an existing image (a static one) and animate a part of it. So in this case, only the trees and the lights and some sky elements change and it’s very subtle. But because it’s such a small part, it uses virtually no CPU. The idea is to be able to make it so that animated wallpapers need not be obnoxious but merely a natural evolution beyond the static pictures we’ve had for the past two decades.
If you don’t have Object Desktop you can get it at http://www.objectdesktop.com. The final version of DeskScapes is due out on October 28th.
