This week DeskScapes 8 was released and while it is most famous for its ability to display animated wallpapers, I personally think of the animated wallpapers as an additional perk on top of the fact that it’s a really awesome way to manage and enhance normal Windows desktop backgrounds.

Its home page is https://www.stardock.com/products/deskscapes.

Multi-monitor support

If you look at DeskScapes 8’s main UI, you’ll notice a few things instantly. First, if you have multiple monitors, you might as well stop here and go get DeskScapes right now.  We’ll wait…

Got it? The ability to set different wallpapers on different monitors easily seems like something that should be part of Windows. But it’s not.  So if you are running multiple monitors and would like to just have different backgrounds then DeskScapes is a no-brainer.

Enhancing your existing wallpapers

I have a love/heat relationship with photograph-based desktop backgrounds. I spend all day in front of my computer and I like my desktop backgrounds to be something pretty. At the same time, I don’t want to be distracted by them.  That’s where DeskScapes comes in:

It has many different filters you can dynamically apply to your desktop backgrounds. One of my favorites is the porthole. By fading the background to black, any icons that might be on my desktop show up and if I have a few windows up, I’m not going to be distracted by a scene peeking around their edges.

Of course, there are many other effects you can apply as well on the fly such as color-based ones.

In this case, I downloaded a really cool background that was a bit “warm” (it was a brownish color). I wanted to alter its color to something cooler (a blue-color). No problem.

Sometimes you just want to combine a wallpaper with a good effect. For example, I downloaded this terrific winter scene and then combined it with an animated snowfall effect. Very relaxing on a cold Winter morning at work.

Just the ones I want

I’ve got a lot of cool art around my machine. Most of it wasn’t even imagined as being used as a desktop background. But with the effects features of DeskScapes, you can pretty much turn any graphic you have into a good background provided that it’s a sufficient resolution. That’s where DeskScapes comes in. 

So you tell DeskScapes to look in all your images folders on your computer or network (gotta love SkyDrive/Dropbox) and then just have it show the images that are sufficiently large enough to be used as a background.

And of course…

To show off the animated stuff I really need a video. And so… here you go!