AutoWallpaper – the missing features

It's only after you've released a new version of some software and you start to get emails from users asking how to do certain things, do you finally realise that a certain feature was missing. Well, this is exactly what has happened during the last week. Some users have been having problems using AW3 because it makes certain assumptions as to what is a multi-monitor wallpaper.For those that don't know, a multi-monitor wallpaper is a picture that has been designed to display over more than one monitor, perhaps a landscape where the main buildings or focus is on the second monitor. The problem is AW3 allows you to specify the minimum size it will assume is a multi-monitor wallpaper, but if you have a digital camera or other images that are particularly large AW3 might wrongly assume those images are multi-monitor images, and so rather than displaying different images on each display, it simply scales the image to span across all displays. This was not something I foresaw when I developed the MM feature, and so, shortly after AW3 release I had to re-visit it a little to ensure that true MM wallpapers would work just as well as very large single display images.And so, the latest update (1209) addresses this problem. On the multi-monitor options section there is now an Exclusion button, this allows the user to enter a list of partial filenames that are NOT to be used as MM wallpapers. What this means is that if you store all your large photos in a folder called 'Holiday snaps' you can add this to the list and your sorted, alternatively, if all your large photos start with DSC then you can add 'DSC' to the list.If you don't use true MM wallpapers you can also disable MM wallpaper support completely.Also included in 1209 was something that suddenly came to me when I was looking into the large image support. When an image is scaled to fit the desktop and a border effect and edge is applied it only affects the image area, the background is left untouched. This may be OK in most instances it would also be nice to have the border effects processed on the whole image for the desktop instead. So, I've added this option to the 'Options' tab.Hopefully AW3 is feature rich enough now to all me to step away from it's development for a while and turn my attention back to Asylum coding. This next 4 days will see me putting together some new assets for Asylum and I will start to talk about it's development soon (probably after day 4 – Sept 12th).