Get tired of your desktop background (wallpaper)?

By Sandra Clitter  

When you spend as much time behind your computer as I do, sometimes you just want to do something ‘fun’ with your computer…I don’t mean ‘fun’ as in playing games (well, maybe YOU want to do that, but it’s just not my thing). By ‘fun’, I mean spicing up your computer with ‘funner’ things than the standard defaults.

We’ve talked about “Fences” in another post (click here to check out that desktop organization tool) which allows you to better organize your desktop. That was more of a ‘functional’, rather than ‘fun’ find.

Today, I ran across something called ‘John’s Background Switcher’. When I went to his website, John sounds like my kinda guy! He finds a solution to a computing problem, then allows the world (yes, you and me) access to the fruits of his labor free of charge. His work is called ‘donationware’. You can use it for free if you like, but if you feel you get value from it, he’d appreciate a donation (there’s a link on his website to allow you to donate should the mood strike you). You can check his site out here. The ‘Background Switcher’ allows you to change the background on your desktop (not the screensaver, but the wallpaper) on a regular basis – from every 10 seconds to once a week! The images that are placed as your background can come from the ‘stash’ you have on your computer or from any number of a variety of sources (Flickr, Facebook, RSS Feeds, Google Images, Picasa, Bing, Yahoo!, etc.). So if you like images from National Geographic, go out and create a link to their photos, and your computer wallpaper will update with the images.

To download, simply go here for a secure, verified download. Run the install, then set it up. Took me a total of 2 minutes to have a rotating wallpaper on my computer. The software appears to be ‘low overhead’ meaning that it will not drag your computer to its knees simply by its presence.

As of right now, I have only added a folder of images of my cats to rotate, but I’ll be playing with the settings and adding more ‘feeds’ – either from my computer or from the web.

You’ll note that you can change the duration that an image stays on your desktop, select how large the image is (you can even create a montage), display different images on different monitors, add multiple feeds (I only show one added here).

There are also a wide variety of more detailed settings if you feel like playing around with them. (Pressing the links on the left changes the settings you can set on the right)

With just a couple of clicks of my mouse, here is what my desktop looks like (much ‘funner’!!):

Even people like me who are ‘creativity impaired’ can be creative with this little program. Thanks, John!!!


3 Comments

  1. Posted October 18, 2011 at 4:07 pm | Permalink | Reply

    Hey, you’re most welcome! 🙂 Glad you like JBS!

    • Posted October 18, 2011 at 4:43 pm | Permalink | Reply

      It was a great fine, thanks to PC World!!!

      Everyone, I don’t know John, and didn’t tell him that I was writing this post, but I’ll be dollars to donuts that he found out because of a Google Alert on his name or his product’s name :-).

  2. Kathy
    Posted October 17, 2011 at 2:46 pm | Permalink | Reply

    As I was reading this blog, I was thinking, “Sounds like a neat tool. I probably won’t use it, but I hope to see pictures of Sandy’s cats!” 🙂 Thanks for sharing!

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