The Master Prawn

We all like a little something on our desktop to brighten up the day. I came across this great post on lifehacker about some gaming desktop wallpaper.

Knowing Windows 7 has a great desktop wallpaper feature where you can have a stack of wallpaper and change them at will I set off downloading them to my machine.

Then right Click on your desktop and select Personalise.

Open the pictures folder and the Personalisation tab side by side

Now, right click any picture and select “Set as desktop background”.

A new “Unsaved theme” will appear.

Select the “Desktop background” option highlighted here in red.

Windows 7 at this point, having a complete degree from the University of Smartarse, will have the folder open where you originally selected the first image.

Select the pictures you want in the slideshow , choose Fill as the Picture position and pick a time you want the pictures to change. i have highlighted the sections below.

You can also drag other files from other folders in there as well, drag and drop applies.

Click “Save changes”.

A new theme will appear, right click on it and pick the option you want.

Save the theme for yourself, or make a theme out of pic’s of embarrassing nights out and send it to your friends.

Here is the theme I created.

Here is what my desktop looks like

high res version

I have seen the future of desktop applications. I am very excited. However I have to remind myself that , like the iPhone (which I don’t own) now all software in the same range is the same.

So you might have heard of twitter, its this crazy funky re-emergence of the SMS , but instead of sending incomprehensible short messages to friends and hot members of the opposite sex, we can do it online. To loads of people , and their dog, apparently.

So I always found twitter something of an annoyance to visit as a web-site, but as a desktop application , its neat enough , as long as people stop mining my tweets and friends so I will follow their rubbish…. anyway I digress, I will pass some more comments on this when the time is right.

I'm a fan of Windows Vista/7 so it was great to hear a podcast about a WPF application for twitter from Hanselminutes.So I grabbed it from here and installed on my machine, its got a great web installer, a feature of .NET , have not seen any application use this installer ever, its very very sweet.

It Just looks fantastic, lots of transparency , animations, sliding effects, fantastic layout.

It will also automatically shorten the URL you paste into a tweet in a slick animated fashion.

Problems are it is the one size at all times ! You cannot re-size the application. Buts its such a small problem , its just do cool, and memory eating , and flamboyant , you have to try it.

So really we are on your way with WPF, I wonder are we going to come from here to this …

Microsoft Labs seem to think so , this is a very good selling point for Microsoft's Software+Services approach. As long as we get WPF based interfaces, I'm tired of the same old app interfaces, this is why I actually loved the office 2007 interface. Its why I like the iPhone interface. And I am looking forward to multitouch in windows 7. Not so I can smudge every screen I own, but its more the idea that I will get a fantastic interface like the above in my lifetime.

Fantastic short film. 

Terrific, captures the feeling of Half Life 2 perfectly. 

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There are a lot of interesting posts about the upcoming Windows Live Updates. One of the most exciting ones is that SkyDrive storage is increasing to 25 Gigabytes.

5GB to 25Gb, a 500% increase! There are new features available on the SkyDrive as well.

• Download whole folders as a compressed Zip archive.
• Move and Copy Files between folders.
• Place your Favourite web links into your SkyDrive and Synch them with the Windows Live Toolbar

These are just a few of my favourite upgrades, and there is lots more. There are more details on the SkyDrive team's blog at http://skydriveteam.spaces.live.com/