Despite being ridiculously busy lately I’ve managed to find some time to work on my beloved John’s Background Switcher. I was originally going to leave it for a bit then over the Summer work on version 4 with some wholesale changes and major improvements. Then I had a few ideas and started fixing bugs and implementing some of these ideas and thought I may as well spend a few weeks putting together an interim release (which I’ll call 3.4). I’ve been working on features like this effect:

[Originals t-l to b-r: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19]

One of the coolest features of the previous version was Snapshot Scrapbook mode that made your desktop look like you’d thrown a bunch of Polaroid snaps onto it. I’ve built on this by adding the option to change the size of each snap (meaning you can get more on your screen – which is much better it turns out). I’ve also added a new option I’ll call ‘Postcard’ mode – which you can see above (this one’s a selection of ‘Interesting’ photos from Flickr over the last 7 days). I think you’ll agree it’s a pretty slick effect and again you can change the size of each photo to decide how many photos you want on each screen. While I may not be getting the time to go out and take landscape photos just now, at least I’m able to write some software that lets me appreciate other people’s!

In a week or two (if you’re a Windows user – I promise one of these days I’ll write a Mac version) – you’ll be able to do the same!