Animated Wallpaper Maker is a desktop enhancement application able to display animated wallpapers using custom images and adding a multitude of special effects and animations. The utility can be deployed on Windows XP, Vista, 7, and 8.
The program can be purchased for $29.77/€26.99. Watermarks are embedded on the output file in the unregistered version.
Animated Wallpaper Maker stands out in the crowd with desktop tools by providing a remarkable animation editor that features lots of customization options and allowing you to export wallpapers to EXE file format so you can share them with your friends.
In case you are not willing to invest time into designing your own animated wallpapers, you can choose between several preset examples or download some more from the Internet. The animated scenes are placed behind your icons and toolbars, so they do not affect your work.
A well-structured workspace
Animated Wallpaper Maker embeds most of its configuration settings in the main window. It manages to offer lots of customization options without making the GUI look too crowded and confusing. However, less experienced users may feel a bit overwhelmed by the advanced fine-tuning parameters.
There’s support for an online help manual in case you need to find out extra details about its functions. Plus, you can appeal to a wizard-like assistant which helps you configure several key parameters for defining an animated wallpaper and getting used to the editing environment.
When it comes to viewing options, you are allowed to use the built-in navigator for exploring the image from a bird’s eye view perspective and zoom in or out of the photo. A preview window records and displays the adjustments and special effects in real time. You may also try on how the wallpaper looks on your screen before making it active.
Design animated wallpapers
Each animated wallpaper may include multiple slides. You can add slides by importing pictures from your personal collection. The tool works with BMP, PNG, TGA, and JPEG file format.
Slides can be shown for a certain number of seconds and fading in/out effects can be displayed between them. Plus, you can make the program play the animation continuously, in a random mode, or at a user-defined time.
Audio files can be played in the background. You can create a list with custom MP3 files and play them in a specific order. You can save projects to a file on your system so you can import data for future adjustments, set the current animation as your default desktop background, or build a standalone animated wallpaper (EXE file format).
What’s more, you can make the app run the wallpaper at Windows startup, show or hide the icons, mute sound, and enable icon smoothing effects for a better quality.
Support for various effects and animations
Animated Wallpaper Maker helps you brighten your desktop looks with the aid several effects, such as ‘Underwater,’ ‘Water Mirror,’ ‘Fire,’ ‘Rings on water,’ ‘Matrix code,’ and ‘Glass Ball.’
Each of the aforementioned effects comes with its own set of customization parameters. For example, you can alter the ‘Underwater’ effect in terms of amplitude, speed, and wave length, while the ‘Matrix code’ one allows you to change the color scheme, transparency, font size, spinner rate, and other options.
The ‘Camera and Parallax’ effect can be used for setting up the camera motion in order to make the current scene slide in the view window. You may opt for a fixed position (camera is turned off), random motion (camera moves in a random direction with random speed), or defined path.
Aside from effects, you can embed all sorts of animations. They are grouped into preset categories so you can quickly identify them, such as Weather (e.g. cloud, snow, fog, lightening), Light & Fire (e.g. explosion, firework, smoke, sparkles), and Nature (e.g. birds, grass, leaf fall, butterflies, fish, bubbles, clock, ghost, UFO).
What’s more, Animated Wallpaper Maker helps you insert custom text (animated font, static text, and scrolling text), animated brushes (e.g. bend, drift, zoom, wave, cloud, fire, water, light, glittering stars, pink hearts), airbrushes (e.g. sparkle, twinkling stars), as well as preset sound (e.g. rain, river, ocean, birds, lion, horse).
Animations can be tweaked too and there are plenty of options that you can alter for each one. For example, you may specify how many objects you want to place in your wallpaper and set their size, speed, motion boundaries, motion properties, and color. Brushes may also be configured in terms of size, opacity, and hardness. In addition, you may undo or redo your actions.
The Good
It provides realistic animation effects and works in a wallpaper sideshow mode by automatically changing the wallpaper and adding fading in/out effects. It eats from a minimal up to a moderate amount of CPU and memory resources, so your computer’s performance is not burdened.