xkcd Wallpaper Randomiser: Hat Guy approved.

If you're not familiar with the webcomic xkcd, it's an extremely witty, funny, nerdy comic strip that really only makes sense to geeks geeks might enjoy more, but anyone can appreciate the wonderful humor it creates. xkcd Wallpaper Randomiser does exactly what it says: it randomises a different xkcd comic as the desktop wallpaper. There's a ton of nice things about it.

Auto-cache: Instead of having to download every comic, xkcd actually downloads them for you and keeps them in a cache folder. Of course, if you, for some reason, don't want that, you can manually delete the cache folder's contents every now and again. But anyway, it only downloads the comics once, then uses the saved version.

Preview pane: Kinda nice, but also kinda useless. You can really only see a preview of the current comic, and it's very small, so the image is blurry. Still kinda nice though.

Exclude: If you come across a comic that is not so funny, you can add it to an "excluded" list, which will prevent it from being used again.

Parameters: True, it does have a user interface, but what's also nice about xWR (wow, I am a lazy abbreviator, aren't I?) is that you can pass two different parameters to make it automatically change. Passing "-random" as an argument will not bring up the GUI, and will just cycle to a new wallpaper. Passing "-silent" will make it ignore any windows that might pop up, if you're not connected to the internet for downloading a new comic.

So this means you can make shortcuts, and even add it to your startup to change the wallpaper.

There are only two limitations, and they are both planned and reasonable.

Can't change wallpaper settings: It usually works best to set the settings to "Center", and the surrounding color to either black or white. But xWR can't do that. Really not a big deal, just go into the Control Panel and change it yourself.

Doesn't automatically change: By that, I mean that with other wallpaper changers, you can set it to automatically change every __ minutes, but xWR is a one time deal. You have to click a button or run the -random parameter every time you want it to change. Really, not a problem, just don't expect it to do things like Wallpaper Master or Wallpaperer or any other wallpaper utility. It's name is xkcd Wallpaper Randomiser," and that's exactly what it does; no more, no less.

Probably the best part about xkcd WR is that it's tiny. It's only 28kb in size, but you do have to account for the image sizes, which can easily climb to several megabytes. Still, it's extremely small if you routinely clean your cache. It's also open source, written in C#.NET 2005, to those who are interested. I'm not entirely sure, but I believe it is portable. I'm just a simple man, but I don't think that it requires the .NET framework, but maybe I'm completely wrong. (It does happen. Quite often, actually.) So it might be portable, it might not.

xkcd Wallpaper Randomiser is written by a fan of the xckd comic strip, so it is available on his website.

Visit xkcd Wallpaper Randomiser (Apathy Sketchpad) website for download

Wallpaper Master: Beautify your wallpaper

Wallpaper Master is a program to automatically switch your wallpaper, much like Wallpaperer. However, besides their purpose, the two programs have very little in common. Wallmaster (as I call it) has many more features than Wallpaperer, even if it does have a slight bit more bulk. But it's still light enough to run without notice. Here's some of the things that won me over for Wallmaster:

-Categories: I have to admit, this was something I longed for when I used Wallpaperer. Sometimes, you're in the mood for scenic wallpaper. Others, maybe your favorite bands. With Wallpaperer, you have too edit multiple INI files, then go in and rename them, and it's a very large hassel, but Wallmaster has a very easy menu where you can add, rename, and delete categories.

-Monitor Directory: Yes. You can make Wallmaster check for new wallpapers every time it starts. You can also make it scan subdirectories as well.

-Preview: It does indeed show a preview of whatever wallpaper you've selected.

-Context options: It has alot of "Misc" options, such as "Copy to category...", "Move to category...", "View in default viewer", "Open in Explorer", "Remove missing links", and several more, every option as useful as the next. You can even rename a file right inside Wallmaster.

-Change on Startup: Useful feature, if you want it. You can also make it "Auto-close after 30 seconds", if you wanted to use Wallmaster to just change the wallpaper once when the computer starts.

-Change every...: The key feature, for me at least. Let's you set the number of minutes until Wallmaster changes. It even displays the remaining minutes on another part of the window, in case you're curious. But what really takes the cake for me is the "Use Ratings" option because Wallmaster has...

-Ratings: My favorite feature. Wallmaster takes wallpapers to the next level, where you can rate each wallpaper individual, 1 through 5. The purpose of this is when you click the "Use Ratings" option, Wallmaster will adjust the time by how high or low a wallpaper is rated. For example, say you specified 10 minutes. A wallpaper with a rating of 1 will change in 5 minutes, a rating of 3 will change in 10, and a rating of 5 will change in 20.

The main reason I like ratings is because I see wallpapers that I like more often. But then, if you're not into that kind of thing, you just switch it off.

-Order: You can again use ratings to adjust how Wallmaster picks the order, or you can make it do "No repeats", or you can make it simply stop at the top of the list and work its way down to the bottom.

That's it for the major functions. Here's some other little things that help make Wallmaster freakin amazing:

-Backgroundcolor: You can select the Background color from inside Wallmaster, or you can make it Autoselect. In case you didn't know, Background Color is the background behind the text on the shortcuts. (If you don't know what I mean, try changing it, and you'll see.) Wallmaster can autochange it, based on the wallpaper, to make you desktop look good. Another program that does this is Iconoid.

-Position: Wallmaster has a bunch of position settings. You can set a default position setting, AND can set it individually for each file, meaning you can set one for resize, one for tile, one for stretch, etc.

-Start with Startup: Practically required, for me.

-Hotkeys: If you're into it, you can set autokeys to mirror, delete, pause, and many more options.

-Separate User Settings: You can make it either do separate user settings, or global.

-Idle Time: You can make it ignore "idle time" for the timer, if you don't want you comp to rotate wallpapers while you're not there.

-Tray icon: The tray icon is amazing. You can do alot of the above stuff just by the tray menu. The thing I like about it is that you can set it where a left click on the tray icon will change the wallpaper to the next in lineup, so you can very quickly proceed with your lineup, if you don't like the current wallpaper.

-Portable?: Still not sure about that.

Wallpaper Master is my favorite app for handling my wallpapers. If Wallpaperer is too simple for you, try Wallpaper Master. It's very advanced, yet the interface is very easy on the eyes and easy to use. There is a Wallpaper Master Pro that is shareware, but the feature list on the free version is more than enough for me.

*I did make the icon at the top based on the program's icon, so if you use it somewhere else, please let me know....and give credit where credit is due.

Visit Wallpaper (James Gart) Website for Download

Wallpaperer: Give your wallpaper ADD

So if you're like me, you have a ton of wallpapers that you like to cycle through, maybe once every few weeks, or maybe a month. But why wait so long? Wallpaperer lets you cycle through wallpapers in any amount of time in hours, minutes, or seconds. So here's all the options/features.

• Start with windows: since you need the process running, it's a good idea to start it with windows. A word of warning, I think there's a problem with this checkbox sometimes, that it wills set the path to "C:\Program Files\WallpapererWallpaperer.exe", and thus will give an error every time, and won't start the program. A simple registry tweak will fix this.
• Change Wallpaper on start: does what it says. If you want a new wallpaper whenever you start the program, or when you start Windows, if you picked the first option.
• Choose Wallpaper randomly: choose this if you want Wallpaperer to "shuffle" through your wallpapers. Otherwise, it will just go down the list, the same order every time.
• Change Wallpaper at specified interval: this to me seems the entire point of the program, but if you want, I guess you could just use this program to change the wallpaper on the startup, then end it. It's your choice, really.

Then there's a box where you can open wallpapers, and a box where you can preview your currently selected wallpaper. I see a few problems with the adding system:

• No drag and drop: you can't drag and drop files from explorer onto the list. This would be really easy.
• "Add Files..." is a lie: although "files" is clearly plural, in the "Add Files" dialog that pops up, you can only pick one wallpaper at a time. Combined with the lack of drag and drop, this leaves you with the fact that you can only add 1 file at a time, unless you can crack open the DAT file and copy paste in your wallpapers, like I did.
  

But other than that, it's a good program. It also has the fact that, as mentioned earlier, there's a preview pane, and you can scroll through your list of wallpapers and double click one if you have the desire for a certain wallpaper. There's also a "Next Wallpaper" button which will either pick the next random wallpaper, or go to the next on the list, depending on how you set the "Change wallpaper randomly" option. The program runs at 3.5mb with window, and 1.8mb in tray, so it's not too resource demanding.

I don't stake my life on this, but I believe that it is portable, since it creates its own INI file, and on the developer's website, you can download just the executable.

Speaking of the developer's site, there are two downloads on the side, one being "Version 1.1" and the other being the "Start with Windows fix". Version 1.1 is an installer, and the fix is just a zip with a wallpaper.exe executable. So if you want to install Wallpaperer, download the installer, install it, then replace the wallpaperer.exe with the fix version. If you want portable, just download the fix, and place it and go. It will create a DAT file containing your wallpapers, and an INI file containing the preferences.

*I did make the icon at the top based on the program's icon, so if you use it somewhere else, please let me know....and give credit where credit is due.

Visit Wallpaperer (Quinnsoft) website for download