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DeskDeco

Fill your life with colour!

Summary

Screenshot
Version: 1.4.2
Updated on: 15.October.2003
Runs on: Windows 95, 98, NT4, 2000, ME, XP
Download Size: 3058K
License: Free Download

Download Now! from Pantera Designs Server

Download Now! from DeskDeco.net

Note: Download includes installer and uninstaller.

Libraries Used (included with above download):
actskin4.ocx, asycfilt.dll, comcat.dll, dcsystray.ocx, msdatlst.ocx, msvbvm60.dll, oleaut32.dll, olepro32.dll.

Details

Ever wanted to have an ever changing picture on your desktop which reflects your mood? Ever had a directory full of pictures which you don't know what to do about, but maybe would look good as a wallpaper on your desktop? Then DeskDeco is just the program for you. DeskDeco was designed to let you choose one such directory full of pictures and it will then shuffle through the list of pictures and select one to put on your desktop. By default, the desktop will be replaced everytime that Windows is started, but DeskDeco can be configured to keep changing the desktop at a variable period of time.

Installation of DeskDeco is pretty straightforward. As with much of the other software, you double-click on the Setup icon and keep pressing Next until you encounter the Finish button, which you would then press. One thing to note, is that by default a shortcut will be created in the Startup menu, which actually makes DeskDeco run every time that Windows is started.

DeskDeco is a program that after being launched works stealthily in the background. Once launched, the desktop wallpaper is changed and the DeskDeco icon appears on the System Tray (somewhere near the clock on the Taskbar). That's it, it will stay there until you need to configure some settings or Windows is restarted, where the process will be repeated once again.

Configuration of DeskDeco is accessed by double-clicking on the icon sitting on the system tray. You can start by entering a directory either by typing the path to the pictures or by pressing the Browse button and search for the path there. Once this is set, why not press the Test button to see if the path has been selected correctly. This should change the wallpaper and also display the same picture in the centre of DeskDeco's window for you to scroll around. You can also change the desktop wallpaper by clicking on the filename in the file-list. Once happy with the result, you can take a look at the final setting which determines if the wallpaper is changed continuously after a timeout or not. You can also change the timer for this option by selecting after how many minutes the wallpaper is replaced. So now, still more happy with the result, you can click the OK button to register these changes. The Cancel button will reset the modifications that you have made during the last session. The OK and Cancel buttons will close the window and return it back to the System Tray. If you want to close DeskDeco definitively, just click the Exit button, but I sincerely don't know why you'd want to do that.

There are four options of how to display the picture on the desktop, the standard Windows centre, tile and stretch and a specially adopted one called Resize. Centre puts the chosen picture in the middle of the screen, it is generally used for pictures which nearly cover the whole screen. Tile uses the picture as a pattern to fill the whole screen, generally used with small pictures. Stretch is used to literally stretch the picture to cover the whole screen, usually for those pictures with the same aspect ratio as the screen, but of different size. By request, I have added a Resize option which is used to resize the picture to cover as much of the screen as possible. So with tall or wide pictures, you get two edges touching the edge of the screen while a black margin will fill the rest of the screen left by the other two edges.

New from version 1.3.0, DeskDeco includes the Colour Effects. If this option is selected, DeskDeco will change the displayed picture's colours. Some will look nice, some psychedelic, some interesting, and others downright ugly, but it's all in good fun. Note that the effects will only modify the picture displayed on the Desktop and not the one that is saved on disk. For this purpose another function has been added to save the current wallpaper to disk. So if you see a picture modified with a colour that you like, you have the possibility to save it. The saved picture will have the
same name as the original one with an incrementing number added at the end. All pictures saved by DeskDeco are in BMP format.

After you get to grips with using DeskDeco and start to see its benefits you will want to obtain some wallpaper. The button labeled Download Wallpaper will connect you to deskdeco.net, which is the official DeskDeco website where you can choose a wide range of wallpaper arranged in different categories. Best of all, the wallpaper downloads at deskdeco.net are all free.

Go on, fill your life with colour!

History

v1.4.2 Fixed Shuffle function after that it was not working in previous release.
v1.4.1 Fixed bug that made program crash on Windows 2000 SP4.
v1.4.0 New option to resize pictures to scale. deskdeco.net has just opened, and a link within DeskDeco takes you there. Displayed picture can now be saved to disk. Sample pictures are now distributed with the standard DeskDeco release, so that the fun can start immediately just after installation.
v1.3.0 Added Colour Effects, which is like increasing the amount of pictures 13 times the original amount since that is the number of colour effects. Program now reads files having the JPEG extension, not only JPG. Unreadable files now display a message instead of crashing the program.
v1.2.1c Releases b and c are the same program as before but with a different installer.
v1.2.1 Fixed bug that was crashing program on startup if picture directory was empty.
v1.2.0 Redesigned program look. Added option to centre, tile or stretch wallpaper. Wallpaper can now be selected manually by clicking on the filename. Screen preview is now centred, that's usually where the focus is.
v1.1.0 First official release

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