Animated GIFs

[rickatnight11]

Sorry, I posted elsewhere not realizing this section was here. I would love to have Animated GIF support in the next release. I have a few Animated GIFs I would like to add to my list.

[Marc G]

I moved this thread to the Wallpaper Cycler section, because I suppose you are talking about Wallpaper Cycler?

Animated gifs might reappear in a future version but have rather low priority.

[rickatnight11]

Why is that, by the way? I would think that a major type of image would be a higher priority. Just wondering!

[Marc G]

Because it requires quite a bit of rework to how Wallpaper Cycler works. Remember that the latest version are capable of rendering complex layouts for the desktop by adding text, webcams, RSS feeds, calendars, ... Making this animated is simply not possible in the current framework.

[Guest]

I understand. I don't have enough experience with programming and I don't know how your code works. I just thought that it had its algorithms to determine which wallpaper to display, and it just told Windows to do that. If this is true then I thought you could just define that image as the background and Windows would animate it, but I guess it's a bit more in depth than that. Do you mind explaining how the framework actually functions? Like does it actually work with the OS code that displays the image to provide more functionality?

[Marc G]

You are correct that I could pass an image (even an animated gif) to Windows and it will animate it on the desktop (at least when active desktop is enabled IIRC).

However Wallpaper Cycler has the following flow. When it cycles it first selects a wallpaper based on your wallpaper cycling settings. Then it will select a layout based on layout cycling settings and the selected wallpaper. A default generated layout will be used if you are running the lite version. Then wallpaper cycler starts to render the desktop into memory. Rendering means drawing the selected wallpaper, rendering text, calendars, webcams, ... based on the selected layout to a memory bitmap. After that the memory bitmap is stored as a bitmap in your temp directory and then Wallpaper Cycler tells windows to use that bitmap as the desktop background.