[release] Osx Abstract Animated (cpu Intensive!)

Hey guys,

The other day I went into futureshop (canadian equivalent to circuit city) and I was toying with an imac and noticed the wallpaper was ANIMATED! Woah, cool.. never seen that before. So I came home and whipped this together.

I went through the boards regarding this very topic and did my research Here. Apparantly trying to animate your program using windows cheats will result in a major decrease in system performance. Well, it so happens my systems specs are quite high and so I figured, what the heck.

So, to those of you that just don't care, and to those that ARE (and only!) running in single monitor mode with a resolution of 1280X1024 then proceed by downloading my version of the MacOSX animated wallpaper, abstract series.

I start a new job tomorrow at the local newspaper full-time so I will be too busy to mod this wall for anybody who wants.

How do you use this? Unpack the zip, go to display preferences in windows, click "Browse", and locate the HTML file I created (with the help of Macromedia Flash MX)

Download here from my home computer. (1.29 MB)

Note, my computer shuts down for the night and so will the URL. I run my server only during daylight hours (north america) (36KB/s upload cap, I'm afraid)

#163417

theres alot of white area on mine. I have same res and using it as you said... the icon text is white as well as the top and left sides.

#163435

Erm, very nice, but couldn't you just make it s a gif? It would be less of a system guzzler and the white spaces would be gone... :6

But Welldone, just the same!

#163445

people should make more animated desktops, imagine the possibilities...

#163448

very nice, thanks

#163455

ok, i'm not at work yet, so I have time to delve into the situation a little further.

i'm not sure why you guys are getting problems with the borders. The animation document is set to 1280X1024 in size so by default it should stretch out completely.

I've changed some of the settings of the animation. It's set to 100X100% but I don't recommend using an alternate desktop resolution because stretching the graphics will likely put more strain on your CPU. I also changed the HTML, so now the body tag is set for 0 pixels for margin space. Maybe this will clear up the problem two of you mentioned.

Here's a few things I observed.

(1) the desktop icons produce a sort of white border around the type. I do not use windows icons the desktop. I use AveDesk so I do not have this problem. Check my screenshot below to see what I mean.

(2) cpu doesn't get robbed too badly for general computing use. I noticed cpu shoots up to 40% or so during transitions only. Other then that's not that cpu demanding. I had a thought. I could space out the transitions to say 10 or 15 seconds each instead of the current 5 meaning the quality of your PC experience is less comprimised.

Screenshot during transition

link to animated wallpaper once again.

Well, that's it. I was thinking of releasing a beach, nature, and space pack soon. If updated release gets enough positive feedback I will follow up with these. For those that experienced border problems I suggest you give this update a try. I'm sure its now resolved.

#163690