GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 570685
Change wallpapers every X minutes
Last modified: 2015-09-13 09:15:30 UTC
Hi, Since a couple days ago, changing wallpapers brings a pleasing fade effect in nautilus 2.25. A good, easy way to show this off would be to make automatic wallpaper changes possible. How about modifying the appearance dialogue to show checkboxes on thumbnails (checking them would make them appear in random, timed wallpaper changes) and a scrollbar to choose every how many minutes you want the wallpaper to change. This would not make the UI much more complicated than it is now, and the scrollbar could always be dragged to the top right in order to set the wallpaper not to change at all.
Created attachment 128029 [details] Mockup This quick mockup shows the bar and the checkboxes
Timed changes are already possible using the XML format. It's just not exposed in the UI for complexity reasons. Your simple mockup probably leaves people rather clueless about what the time bar is for, though. Refining the mockup a bit and adding support for random slideshows might be a nice gnome-love task.
I have to agree that this features is much wanted - even if it's merely eye-candy. A also agree that we certainly don't want to leave people clueless because the UI is to complex. A UI expert/team should work out the complexity issue. I do like the scroolbar in the first mockup. Here's a mockup I've created: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_MOCs5B8LekE/SXUF3bmEZJI/AAAAAAAAAHw/PJ24CngwBBE/s1600-h/background-Screenshot.jpg //MadsRH
I currently use Wallpaper Tray to change wallpaper on a timed basis. It would be very nice to not have to install extra apps to do something that could, with a small change, be implemented inside an existing GUI. The new fade effect is very nice,but we should make it available to all users--most of us in the Ubuntu testing group came across it quite by accident & I feel that it could be given a higher exposure similar to the way Gnome-Screensaver has.
Mads, I think your mockup is great. Much clearer than mine. I only have two questions about it. -How flexible would it be? Say it lets you change every 5, 15 or 60 minutes, every day or every day you restart your computer? -How would you select more than one image? I agree that new users may find hard to find out what exactly the checkboxes do, but I assume in your mockup you have to press Ctrl to select additional images? I think that would be less discoverable than the checkboxes.
Created attachment 128140 [details] Mockup By the way, mc4100 from ubuntuforums made another mockup. He says: "The original mockup was criticized for being sort-of vague with which things like checkboxes are doing what. So this one basically does the same thing, but under the explicit Heading of a time-based transitional cycle or variations thereupon. It's essentially just eog's image collection with a few options from where it's getting the images (Above, Folder..., and RSS Feed... -- and the checkboxes only appear when "Above" is selected), and a bar to set the time".
Created attachment 128142 [details] Mockup I made a couple additional mockups, just to sew some things together. The first one uses Mads' selector plus my checkboxes, which use tooltips for greater clarity.
Created attachment 128143 [details] Mockup The second one also uses mc4100's ability to watch a folder or RSS, but implemented in a simpler way. It might still be a bit over the top though, I'm just throwing some ideas here.
Personally, while I agree the checkboxes make it more obvious how to select multiple images and don't like them a lot because they clutter up the entire UI for a single option (that's unless they are hidden when slideshow mode isn't selected, at least). (Also note that if you start adding new features (like RSS feeds) this will easily go far beyond a small gnome-love task. I'd advise to stick to exposing the functionality already available for now (which I'm not totally sure about myself; somebody would have to dig that up from the mailing lists from around when the feature was implemented. The fedora lists are probably a good place to start looking. Search for posts by Soeren Sandmann, I believe).
"that's unless they are hidden when slideshow mode isn't selected, at least" Well, there's no reason not to do that. As for RSS feeds and stuff, that might be moved to another request since it's a different issue really.
Any additional thoughts on this?
We won't be adding tools to create slideshows, or random backgrounds, as there are already applications that do this kind of thing quite well, and their UIs are clearly focused around that. For example, Wallpaper gallery at http://www.olmec.co.nz/
I agree with the comments above that it'd be nice to have this feature built into GNOME instead of requiring extra tools that may not be available for all systems. If the interface complexity is an issue, I think GNOME should fellow KDE's way of offering a 'slideshow' option in the drop-down list that's already there (the one that contains 'Wallpapers', 'Pictures Folder'...).
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 31319 ***