Wally - And Your Desktop Will Never Get Old

Customizing your computer's appearance is never easy, but not many users can resist it. For people that stay in front of a desktop up to 12 hours a day, a fancy wallpaper, funny icons or original themes are meant to take some of the pressure off, while others just enjoy themselves trying to transfer some of their personality to the device.

Of course the race for the perfect wallpaper for example never ends, since new designs are created every day and new pictures are shot probably every second. That is why browsing the internet for today’s cool wallpaper it’s like looking for a needle in a hay stack, at least if you do not have the proper tool. Wally is a nice application that can get the job done if you are willing to rely on tags set by other people.

Wally is designed to implement a very interesting concept: automatically changes the wallpaper at a certain interval set by the user, using files situated on HDD or images from several online services, sorted by tags. The hole idea seems great but make note that that implies using others judgement when it comes to the photos tags, hence you cannot know for sure what will you get, which is both exciting and a bit dangerous at the same time.

The Looks

Wally’s interface does not take much space out of your desktop considering its features can be accessed via a status bar menu. Once you set up the image source the menu allows you to start or pause the random display of images. The same area gives you the possibility to manually jump to the next image, save the photo, get the EXIF info, explore the image source or access the Settings panel.

Wally’s menu is also able to provide easy access to the History window where you can preview and see the info of the photos used so far. Note that Wally is only saving here the image location, a thumbnail and its metadata. Right click on a certain image and you will be able to see the available options, but, if you want to actually preview the image and so on it will be simply downloaded again.

Last but not least you can easily change Wally’s localization to one of the 13 available languages: Catalan, Chinese, Czech, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish. In fact the menu represents a quick way to manage the application once everything is set up, but to get things going you must first access the Settings window.

The Works

Wally is able to download images from different websites and automatically set them as your wallpaper while offering several customization options made available through the Settings window. For each website the user has the possibility to add several tags or set different sorting criterion. Note that each website deals with images in its own way.

For example deviantArt allows you to use tags and set the adult filter status (strict or off), while Vladstudio allows you to choose the category, the order and direction. In the second case an adult filter is not available but the website by its nature does not feature adult content. Other websites like Google offer more detailed options so the filter can be strict, moderate or off.

An interesting situation is raised by the Panoramio website: the user can choose to download pictures taken at a certain location, and if the exact longitude and latitude is not known it can be selected on a map. All in all, the options offered by different websites go from a more detailed searching method to specifying the images order, and make note that some do not provide an adult filter.

Currently Wally is providing automatic access to the image libraries of the following websites: deviantArt, Vladstudio, Google, Bing, SmugMug, Picasa, BuzzNet, PhotoBucket, Ipernity, Pike, Panoramio, Yahoo and Flickr. The list could improve and I believe that adding websites like National Geographic or NASA will raise the quality of the images.

Still if you do not want to download images from the internet you can set Wally to randomly display images stored on your HDD. If you are adding the images as individual files Wally also allows you to preview them. This way you will be able to use the application even if you do not have an active internet connection.

Another thing that you should consider if you are using the different websites is that Wally is actually downloading the images on your hard drive. Of course, the images remain on your disk only if you choose to save them, while the settings panel allows you to set the period of time for which you want to store the images history and allows you to delete the metadata in one click, but if you set automatic saving locations for each website your disk could get rather crowded.

In this case the disk space used by Wally increases naturally each time you have your wallpaper changed. On the top of the Settings window you can set the default refresh rate, although you can also choose to immediately go to the next photo via the status bar menu. The same area allows you to set the border color and the image position on the desktop (Centered, Tiled, Center Tiled, Centered Maxpect, Tiled Maxpect, Scaled, Center Auto Fit, Scale&Crop, Symmetrical Tiled, Mirrored Tiled and Symmetrical Mirrored Tiled). For each position you can preview the way in which the image will be processed if it is smaller or larger than the screen.

One of the positions that I believe are missing from the list is Fit to Screen. The function is obviously useful if you have pictures that almost match you desktop’s size but if the image is too small the effect is a disaster. To solve this situation you could choose to download only images that are larger than the screen and have them centered. Still if you like to have the images regardless of their size, Wally gives you the possibility to download the images independent of the desktop’s size (the same drop down menu allows you to choose to download images that are at least 1/2 or 3/4 of the desktop).

In fact the Settings panel provides many useful options in the Main tab while in the Network tab you can choose to have Wally connect to the internet through a proxy. The Main tab allows you to specify the active modules, set the limit for saving remote photos, choose to use full desktop area, display the images in random order or only use landscape-oriented images. These are only some of the available features and you should explore a bit in order to get the exact result you want.

This is actually the only way to get around considering that Wally does not provide any kind of help document or user manual that might get an insightful image about the use and purpose of each feature. On the other hand the simple interface does not raise problems and, if you want some extra information, the About window also displays the Qt version used for developing Wally and the app's supported image formats.

Wally is ignoring all the wallpaper adjustments that have been made via the System Preferences and is applying its own rules. The modification is irreversible even if you quit the application: the last used wallpaper will remain on your desktop, and to use the system settings you must manually set a new wallpaper.

The Good

The Bad

The Truth