Wally dresses up your desktop

Not every application advances users’ productivity or enhances system security – some are just for fun. Take for instance Wally, which lets you change your desktop wallpaper, using photos stored on your PC, copied via FTP, or downloaded from sites like Flickr or Picasa.

Developer Antonio Di Monaco says he was inspired to create Wally by a similar program, John’s Background Switcher, but wrote Wally as a multiplatform application that doesn’t require all the resources of the .Net architecture. Wally also offers more photos sources than JBS.

Di Monaco started working on the project in August of last year. Instead of .Net, Wally uses the Qt4 application framework. Di Monaco says, “I think that’s the most powerful and comprehensive framework available today for the C++ programming language.” Qt4 handles most of the aspects related to multiplatform coding; only small portions of the code are platform-dependent. Thus Wally can run under more than half a dozen Linux window managers, including KDE, GNOME, XFCE4, Fluxbox, and Blackbox, in addition to Windows and Mac OS X, as long as users have Qt4 installed.

To publicize the software, Di Monaco created a page on his website, and made sure the program was also listed on the Qt applications website and application hosting sites such as Download.com and Softpedia.com.

The latest version, released on Saturday, includes GUI improvements, history improvements, Panoramio item configuration using world maps, EXIF information, the ability to use Bing images, and a lot of bug fixes. Di Monaco says a complete code refactoring will be coming up to take advantage of Qt 4.6 and its many new features when that software comes out of beta. He also plans to include many ideas proposed by users, such as configuration of photo geometry on the desktop, the ability to process an image with image filters before display, a timeline of photos, and more desktop effects.

Still, Di Monaco can’t do it all alone. He could use help with translations, starting with French. “That does not require any computer programming knowledge, because Qt offers a tool for doing that,” he says. “I’d also accept help with coding and GUI design.”