I just finished uploading the new files to my Google Code page with the source for v1.1 of Xfce Wallpaper Changer Mono Edition (as seen here previously) and v1.0 of Xfce Wallpaper Non-Mono Edition (new and unproved!).
The Non-Mono edition is written in C/GTK+ and duplicates the functionality and feel of the C# original. The 1.1 update to the mono version contains a few aesthetic changes to standardize it with the non-mono version.
Again, these are only tested on Xubuntu 9.10 32-bit because I'm too lazy to test them on anything else.
Sunday, November 8, 2009
Friday, November 6, 2009
Xfce Wallpaper Changer 1.0
I was looking for an automatic wallpaper switcher for Xfce. Before you type your fingers off in comments, yes I'm aware of doing it with a shell script. That just wasn't what I wanted. I developed a Mono application with Gtk# to do what I wanted, and I thought I should share it. A few notes:
1. There is nothing professional about this, I hacked it together in a few spare hours over the course of a few days.
2. It's written in C# with Mono/Gtk#. If you don't like that for any reason, there's nobody twisting your arm to use it. I am planning on trying to write this in straight up C/Gtk+, however, and presumably by the end of next week I would be done with that. It's a really simple app, after all.
3. This is basically just implementing the one extra step that the Xfce developers didn't build into their desktop wallpaper manager. The Xfce team is doing great in my book, they can't think of every little thing somebody would want.
How It Works:
Set up your Xfce desktop background to an image list.
When you compile and launch the app, it will live in the tray (system notification area). You can click on the tray icon to toggle showing the GUI. You can right-click on the tray icon and close the app or force it to change wallpapers. In the GUI, you have a menu and a spinbutton control. You can change the spinbutton control to the number of minutes between wallpaper changes. The menu will allow you to (again) switch the wallpaper immediately, or exit the program.
What the program actually does is force the Xfce desktop module to reload, which refreshes the wallpaper from your list.
I've hosted the source code and icon at Google Code in a tarball. I included a binary that I compiled as well, but no idea if it will run out-of-the-box or not. You'll have to have at least Mono and Gtk# installed for it to run. I have only tested it on Xubuntu 9.10 (Karmic) 32-bit. I don't see why it wouldn't work on other Xfce-based platforms, but I can't test it so I won't say it can.
I hope it's useful to somebody, and I hope to have a post up about a C/Gtk+ version of it sometime next week, which I'm sure would make some people happy.
1. There is nothing professional about this, I hacked it together in a few spare hours over the course of a few days.
2. It's written in C# with Mono/Gtk#. If you don't like that for any reason, there's nobody twisting your arm to use it. I am planning on trying to write this in straight up C/Gtk+, however, and presumably by the end of next week I would be done with that. It's a really simple app, after all.
3. This is basically just implementing the one extra step that the Xfce developers didn't build into their desktop wallpaper manager. The Xfce team is doing great in my book, they can't think of every little thing somebody would want.
How It Works:
Set up your Xfce desktop background to an image list.
When you compile and launch the app, it will live in the tray (system notification area). You can click on the tray icon to toggle showing the GUI. You can right-click on the tray icon and close the app or force it to change wallpapers. In the GUI, you have a menu and a spinbutton control. You can change the spinbutton control to the number of minutes between wallpaper changes. The menu will allow you to (again) switch the wallpaper immediately, or exit the program.
What the program actually does is force the Xfce desktop module to reload, which refreshes the wallpaper from your list.
I've hosted the source code and icon at Google Code in a tarball. I included a binary that I compiled as well, but no idea if it will run out-of-the-box or not. You'll have to have at least Mono and Gtk# installed for it to run. I have only tested it on Xubuntu 9.10 (Karmic) 32-bit. I don't see why it wouldn't work on other Xfce-based platforms, but I can't test it so I won't say it can.
I hope it's useful to somebody, and I hope to have a post up about a C/Gtk+ version of it sometime next week, which I'm sure would make some people happy.
