AlternativeRealities Software Blog

Not much longer now
24-Jul-2008

I had a couple of days this week set aside for some serious AutoWallpaper coding, and I have to say things went extremely well - at least until we had a powercut.

AutoWallpaper 4 is now in what I will be calling an internal beta state. Everything from version 3.5 has now been upgraded to the 4.0 code base and some of the new features are in and working nicely. The interface is also pretty much complete and I will be posting screenshots soon.

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Version 4 development continues
14-Jul-2008

Yeah I know, I missed the posting last week. I just plum forgot because of the work load I had at the time. 

Anyway let's get stuck into to this update. A small update for v3.5 of AutoWallpaper was release last week that fixed a problem with the seconds timer on some computers running Windows XP SP3 (and possibly SP2).

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A better user experience
30-Jun-2008

This weekends coding bash focused my attention on the largest change to AutoWallpaper 4, the interface. As I mentioned in my previous post, all of the preferences options have been moved to a new preferences window. The other aspect that needed to be changed was the Effects options.

The amount of available space to me in my compiler for hidden elements has been getting smaller and smaller with each new version (don't ask me why). So it has been necessary to change the effects options. The new, and improved, layout gives me ample options for expanding the amount of features later on. Basically, the effects tab now shows a thumbnail view of each of up to 10 monitors. You can click a thumbnail to open up the effects configuration window for that monitor, this window contains all of the features that were previously available on the main window.

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Keeping everything up-to-date
23-Jun-2008

Firstly I would like to apologise to anyone that has the automatic update notification enabled for the problem with the most recent update release. The problem relates to an internal issue with AutoWallpaper 3.5 and the filename it is set to check. This issue has been well and truly sorted out for AutoWallpaper v4.

And so on to the continuing development of AW4. This weeks development has been focused on the creation of new categories using the new storage method and the automatic background updating of categories. Previous version of AutoWallpaper performed the category updates just after start-up and the program and cycles would have to wait until the update was completed. This could lead to a longer delay at the start of the application before the first wallpaper change. In AutoWallpaper 4 this process is now fired off as a seperate process, this can be observed in the main window of AW4 by the addition of an extra notification beneath the current 'minutes until' note. The process is set to the minimum possible priority to avoid it taking up too much CPU usage, the downside to this is that if you have several thousand wallpapers it can take longer to update the categories. The upadte process will verifiy and add images added to each folder according to their creation date, meaning that after the initial setup the process should be faster. However the up-side is that AutoWallpaper will continue to function and cycle wallpapers while the update to the categories takes place.

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One giant step forward
16-Jun-2008

Another excellently productive weekend coding spree for AutoWallpaper 4. I decided this weekend to knuckle down and test out a theory I had about how to allow the next version of AutoWallpaper to change wallpapers WITHOUT freezing up the application it's self. There were two methods I could use: 

Multi-Threading - this allows a single application to fire off a seperate process that takes care of the wallpaper cycling. This is the most complicate method because of all the inter-application communication.

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Development Update for v4
02-Jun-2008

Both sequential and random wallpaper selection routines have now been completely rewritten for the forthcoming version 4 of AutoWallpaper. I have also sorted out a couple of other features that are going to make a debut in version 4.

The first of those is the ability to set up profiles of categories for your wallpapers. With this feature, for example, you will easily be able to have a profile called 'Sunny Day' and assign a few categories to it, and then have another profile called 'Rainy Day' and have other categories assigned to it. Then you will be able to simply select a profile and it will automatically activate and deactivate the categories assigned to it.

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Category mayhem
27-May-2008

Well not really mayhem - a bug was found in AutoWallpaper 3.5 (by a user) that meant that if someone attempts to add more than 2 (why it didn't affect 1 or 2 I don't know) categories without configuring any watch folders the application would crash and then refuse to start again until the offending category file had been removed. 

What was happening was when the category had been created AutoWallpaper would try to scan the currently active folder for images regardless of whether the user had set it to or not, and this configuration caused a headache for the main category update and scanning routines resulting in a critical crash.

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Looking FOURwards
19-May-2008

Over the last few weeks I have been investigating an issue with AutoWallpaper 3.5 when it is left running for days at a time. Now this probably only affects a small number of users but I feel it is worth fixing anyway.

As I have already started to develop the next version of AutoWallpaper my attention is on fixing the problem for the new update instead of trying to fix the issue twice. It will be a lot easier to correct in my current 4.0 codebase as the bug is caused by the creation of the new wallpaper image. In version 4.0 of AutoWallpaper this whole routine is being completely re-written - this is due to multiple reasons but the main one is that I am totally changing the way wallpaper information is stored. The new method will allow the application to locate required wallpapers much faster and without the need to build up large arrays internally.

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