GLOBOS

GLOBOS is a desktop utility that runs in the systray and gives you the possibility to replace your wallpaper with a graphical representation of Earth (world map and globe) or the Moon. The Earth view takes into account your region and time settings to simulate the sun's position and to reflect light on the world map, while the Moon view takes into the consideration the earthshine (Da Vinci's Glow).

Installing this program isn't necessary since you can just extract the archive contents and double-click the .exe to fire up GLOBOS. It can be saved on a thumb drive and directly launched on any computer without setup. Although it doesn't draw your attention with a balloon message, GLOBOS creates an icon in the system tray, providing you access to its options via the right-click menu.

You can set the wallpaper to Earth, Moon or Globe view, restore the original one, zoom out and in again, and reload the image if you experience display issues. You can put the monitor to sleep from the context menu, lock the workstation and then put it to sleep, activate your screensaver if you have one set, or disable it. The screensaver disable setting didn't work on Windows 10 in our tests.

Additional controls unrelated to the monitor can be accessed from the right-click menu of GLOBOS. For instance, you can run Windows Explorer or Calculator, reboot or shut down your computer, make the window of any running application stay on top of others or adjust its level of transparency, open and close the disc tray as well as eject the USB storage device. When hovering the mouse over the program's icon in the systray, you can view the current RAM usage.

Lastly, it's possible to replace the original Earth view with a custom image file in the 256-color BMP format, renamed to "earth.bmp", and placed in the same directory as GLOBOS. Restarting the program is required to set the new Earth picture on the screen. The original wallpaper gets restored automatically when exiting the desktop enhancement app.

Command lines are supported. The resolution of the live wallpaper is automatically set to match your default resolution. However, this can be changed from the console. The supported commands are included in the downloaded package.

All aspects considered, GLOBOS doesn't have rich options but it offers a simple solution for showing the world map, globe or the Moon on your desktop by taking into account the time of day to correctly distribute light and shadows.