This post and the software described in it were originally planned to be released before or on December 24th, but I didn’t manage to finish either. So consider my random wallpaper generator as a late christmas gift.

The idea for this program was born rather quickly: I wanted to have some nice and fancy desktop background images (»wallpapers«), and I wanted them to change every day. This is nothing new, I already did that in the past by writing scripts that choose one random image from a certain directory, scale them to fit on the screen and use them as wallpaper. This approach is simple and common; it’s supported by all major desktop enviroments now, if I remember correctly. However, it has two drawbacks: First, you need to update the pool of available images every now and then so it doesn’t get boring. Second, everyone who’s looking at your desktop (maybe because you do a presentation, or you want to show something, or you requested some help) will be distracted by the wallpaper. You’ll likely end up talking about the things that can be seen on the wallpaper rather than the real subject.
A proper solution for this is having a generator that procedurally creates random images that are suitable as background images – that is, nice, soothing images that don’t distract too much. Basically the kind of background images that shipped as default in Ubuntu up to 7.10 and Mac OS X up to 10.4. My program is trying to do exactly that.
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I want to apologize for the lack of posts here. I know that many people want to know the outcome of the Apple thing and the status of the two jeopardized programs. So, to finally break the much too long period of silence, here’s the current status of the projects:

The presentation program is online again under its new name Impressive: http://impressive.sourceforge.net. Currently, there’s only a rebranded 0.10.2 version, but I hope to move forward with a new version in the first quarter of 2009.

The iPod management tool has been renamed to rePear: http://repear.sourceforge.net/. Along with the rename, the brand-new and much improved version 0.4 has been released.

I find it unfortunate and unnecessary that the issue needed to be settled involving layers and lots of money. It would have been easier for both sides (and certainly more civilized) to simply write an e-mail to state the problem. I am willing to co-operate. You can still call your lawyers if I don’t comply, but I don’t see any reason why there should be money involved from the start.

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