After good healthy interest in yesterday’s video I decided to post the code in a repository (GPLv3 and CC-BY-SA) and as a second act to deliver Mark Shuttleworth’s feature request which I show off in the new video:
View Video on Blip
This is particularly cool since it means desktops will converge and look the same at certain dates as well as diverge and look different at all other times. What are your thoughts?
To be honest, I’m not that interested in it. No one would notice that the wallpaper’s changing, because it does it so slowly. And the wallpaper is still just some blobs on a purple background. There are other much more interesting dynamic backgrounds, for example: photos that change their lighting according to the time of day.
I think this is a cool idea and project. With Martins help I have the original ‘genetic-wallpaper’ running on my netbook. I have just set up a cron job that runs a bash script every ten minutes and it is cool to see things change, and progress. Sure it is short movements, but it is different. This might look even cooler if the svg was not purple – say black with a star background and the ‘lights (or planets) shifting around. I like the corona effect, too, that is in the ‘Mark Shuttleworth’s feature request.’
Good job, Martin and I like the new vid!
I’m oh so curious: Is there something in the videos or is there a little stutter I hear?
Stammer. Not bad really.
Interesting evolutionary development of the genetic wallpaper.
Very cool… I bet there are clever things you could do with this to count down until a release, or do something akin to an advent calendar.
In any case, I definitely think SVG for the background makes a lot of sense just from a cd space saving perspective. Besides, these days there is such variety in screen dimensions and aspect ratios that it makes a lot of sense that the default wallpaper should be scalable, so Ubuntu’s desktop appears with the sharpest graphics no matter what you put it on. I know there’s a lot in SVG that is hard to guarantee any arbitrary system would support, but I think the benefits are worth it even if you have to stick with just a lowest common denominator set of SVG features (but I think that set would be sufficient for doing a lot of artistically interesting things.)
Bryce: Some paliminary work on what features work and what features don’t is a really good idea. We know text doesn’t and a lot of filter effects don’t. But bluring does, as does transforms. Although bluring, grouped transforms don’t. *shrug*
At the moment the gnome wallpaper is generated at 90dpi and then stretched, so it’s not taking advantage of the scalar nature of the files.
But you’re right that the script and it’s svg can be compressed to peanuts.