LoneColor

When it comes to customizing your Windows operating system, there’s a big chance that the first thing you do is change the background image with something that looks awesome or that characterizes you.

Regardless of content, most of the time you’ll have something other than the default Windows wallpaper and with the arrival of Windows 8, a new taste has started to develop amongst developers and users, that for minimalistic applications and design.

A great example for this is LoneColor. It’s a lightweight app that you can use to change your desktop wallpaper to a random solid color with just two clicks. Every time you run LoneColor, you get a new color that is more or less vivid which fills up your desktop.

LoneColor is fitted with an option that allows you to tell it exactly what color you want on your desktop and you can achieve this in two ways. One way is to add the color you want to the application's name, for example ‘LoneColor Red’. Once that’s done and you run the app, red will be your new solid color background.

I doesn’t really matter if you rename the desktop shortcut or the .exe file where LoneColor is installed as it works either way. Moreover, you can rename multiple shortcuts for LoneColor with different colors and the feature still works.

The other way you can get the color you want is to add its HTML code in the name, like so: ‘LoneColor #DE994B’. The latter is a bit more difficult to get but there are enough web-based applications that can generate the code in a second.

Having a beautiful solid color for a background has its benefits both psychologically and when it comes to used system resources but nevertheless, at some point you’ll want to go back to a landscape photo or such.

To restore your previous wallpaper, all you have to do is rename the app to ‘LoneColor C’ and run it. This brings up the familiar ‘Desktop Background’ settings window from where you can choose the image library you want to use.

There are a lot of apps out there that can change your background to something, but LoneColor takes it to a new level in terms of ergonomics and approach, bringing you a refreshing alternative.