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This article was written on May 29, 2008 by CyberNet.

Tutorial Thursday

Windows only
One of the things that I thought was pretty cool with my Mac was that it lets you rotate your desktop backgrounds at set intervals using images on your computer. That got me wondering what kind of solutions are available for Windows users that do something similar, and what I happened to stumble upon is a real gem.

John’s Background Switcher is a free application that does exactly what you would expect it to, but likely goes a step further than anything you’ve seen before. It’s not only capable of grabbing images directly from your computer, but it can also interact with multiple online services including Flickr, Phanfare, SmugMug, Picasa, and Yahoo. What’s really nice is that it even supports retrieval of your private images for nearly all of the online services either through authorization or by providing your username/password. Heck, you can even mix and match the sources you want to pull images from. Neato!

Need a calendar on your desktop? No problem! Background Switcher has an option to display a monthly calendar directly on your wallpaper, and it will highlight the current day. Now how convenient is that?

Oh, right, but you use multiple monitors. Yeah, it supports that, too. You can have it show the same picture on each monitor, one picture for the entire desktop, different pictures on each monitor, or only show one picture on the main monitor. I think you get the point… this is a very full-featured background rotation utility.

(Click to Enlarge)

One thing that I do want to point out is that you can obviously specify the interval that the backgrounds will rotate, but it can also be done manually. To do that just double-click on the System Tray icon, and it will immediately begin processing a new background to use.

–Very Impressive Layouts–

Not only can this flip through your images, but it can also take multiple photos and lay them out in a way that is sure to make your friends go “wow.” Take the “Snapshot Scrapbook” mode for example, which takes a handful of your photos and lays them out in a polaroid fashion. It also takes one image and converts it to black and white to be used as the background. The number of images shown on the screen at any given time are dependent on your monitor’s resolution, and here’s what it looks like using images tagged as “flowers” from Flickr:

Note: The application does place some text in the upper-right corner of the background with the program’s name. I didn’t see any option to eliminate this.

If you want to see more images at a time just switch over to the mosaic mode where it will grab a lot of thumbnails, and then tile them on your desktop. Here’s what that looks like once again using images tagged as “flowers” from Flickr:

–Performance–

One of the questions that I frequently get asked when writing about apps like this is what kind of performance hit a PC will take for running this. As you can see above there are a handful of multi-image layouts that you can choose from, and Background Switcher has to generate the background each time the wallpaper is switched out.

On my Vista machine the memory usage for the app sat around 13MB when idle, and 21MB when hard at work. The processor usage obviously spiked while putting together the background, but the highest I saw it go was 65% (it only did that for a split second, too). That’s not all bad for what the program accomplishes.

The nice thing is that Background Switcher is actually a performance-conscious app, and offers several different settings to make sure it doesn’t interrupt your work. Here are some of the things you customize:

• On start up don’t switch the wallpaper for a specified number of seconds. This gives the rest of your apps a chance to finish loading before it starts working on the background.
• Stop switching the background when the screensaver is running.
• Stop switching when running over terminal services (ex. remote desktop).
• Only switch when the system has been idle for at least 15 seconds.
• Stop switching if any programs you specify are running. Great for games or applications that require extensive use of your computers resources.

–Overview–

To be honest I haven’t gotten this excited about an application in a long time. The interface is very intuitive and simple, but at the same time there are tons of things you can customize. And the fact that it supports so many online photos services is astounding. Plus it’s free! The developer is even very active in the support forum in case you need help using it, or just have a feature request. It’s not often that you see an application and developer of this caliber that doesn’t charge a dime.

Get John’s Background Switcher

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Nokia Lumia 800 shipping in November for $585, available for pre-order now originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 26 Oct 2011 05:30:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We flew all the way to London and crashed on a friend’s couch just to tell you all about the new hotness from Nokia. Nokia? Huh? Why? Because this is important: Windows Phone has long been a legit competitor in need of some beast hardware. More »

Fancy some turn-by-turn voice-guided navigation, cloud based music or sports highlights on your brand new Nokia smartphone? You don’t need an app for that: the Lumia 800 is now the only Windows Phone with full navigation built-in. Nokia announced its Drive navigation, which has a look and feel that should be comfortable with users of its former Ovi Maps suite. It also looks to have similar functionality, enabling the download of maps so that you can find your way into offline areas (see gallery, below).

There’s also exclusive Music and ESPN Sports Hub apps. The former features Mix Radio, a service that streams “locally relevant music” across hundreds of channels. The latter, meanwhile, allows sports fans to check up on stats, scores and news, and to pin their favorite teams or leagues to the start screen. All told, the company is promising a “uniquely Nokia” experience — guess their slick hardware won’t be the only way they break out of the WP7 pack. Check out a video demo of the navigation embedded after the break.

Amar Toor and James Trew contributed to this report.

Continue reading Nokia announces its Drive navigation, Mix Radio, and ESPN Sports Hub cloud services for WP7

Nokia announces its Drive navigation, Mix Radio, and ESPN Sports Hub cloud services for WP7 originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 26 Oct 2011 05:07:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Finally, here it is. The flagship device Nokia is counting on to bring a smile to our phone-loving faces, a sigh of relief to its shareholders, and a twinkle to the eyes of Finnish tax collectors everywhere. And, guess what? This heavily leaked handset might just live up to our high expectations. From the outside, the Lumia 800 is very similar to our beloved N9. Dubbed the “first real Windows Phone,” this device is powered by a 1.4GHz Qualcomm MSM8255 CPU and is sculpted from the same 12.1mm (0.48-inch) thick piece of durable polycarbonate plastic, with tapered edges on the top and bottom to give it that industrial look and make it feel thinner than it really is. Sitting at the top of the device is Nokia’s logo, just above the company’s curved ClearBlack AMOLED (800 x 480) display, with a Carl Zeiss optics-enhanced lens around back. The Lumia 800 also packs 16GB of internal storage, 512MB of RAM and 25GB of free SkyDrive space, and features Nokia Drive, Nokia Music and ESPN Sports Hub baked into its OS. As for that OS, it’s all about a fresh beginning: those bold squares you see on the screen are, of course, the sleek live tiles of Windows Phone Mango.

The eight megapixel camera, meanwhile, packs an f/2.2 aperture, and is designed specifically for low-light environments. It seems pretty similar to what you’ll find in the N9, and according to Nokia, it’s simply a shooter that works for “ordinary people, under ordinary circumstances.” You’ll also find quad-band GSM support, with HSDPA download speeds of up to 14.4Mbps. Now, for the basics: the Lumia 800 is priced at €420, or about $585. It’s already up for pre-order now, and is scheduled to roll out across France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and the UK, beginning in November. It’ll make its way to Hong Kong, India, Russia, Singapore and Taiwan before the end of the year, and will hit “further markets” sometime next year. Check out a few more pics in the galleries below, or head past the break for a design video, and the official PR. For even more details, check out the Lumia 800 product page, linked below.

Dante Cesa and Sharif Sakr contributed to this report.

Continue reading Nokia announces the Lumia 800, the ‘first real Windows Phone’ (video)

Nokia announces the Lumia 800, the ‘first real Windows Phone’ (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 26 Oct 2011 04:42:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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