Marc Gregoire’s Blog

The Smart Orientation feature allows you to tell Wallpaper Cycler to only use wallpapers with certain tags when the primary monitor is in landscape or portrait mode. The Tags Support feature of Wallpaper Cycler has built-in support for the tags Landscape, Portrait and Square. When you import an image into Wallpaper Cycler, it will get one of these 3 tags automatically. This in combination with the Smart Orientation feature makes it very easy to configure Wallpaper Cycler for support of rotating monitors or tablets.

The following is a screenshot from the configuration of the Smart Orientation feature:

Tags (including the Landscape, Portrait and Square tags) can also be assigned to layouts. Everything works together as follows. Let Wallpaper Cycler automatically assign Landscape, Portrait or Square to new wallpapers. Configure the Smart Orientation feature to only use Landscape or Square tagged wallpapers when the primary monitor is in landscape mode and only Portrait or Square tagged wallpapers when the primary monitor is in portrait mode. Then you can create different layouts for landscape and portrait and assign the appropriate tags to your layouts. When Wallpaper Cycler will cycle the wallpaper, it will first check the current orientation of your primary monitor. Based on that and based on the Smart Orientation configuration, it will select wallpapers with the correct tags for that orientation of your monitor. Then it will try to find layouts with tags that match tags of your wallpaper and use that layout to render your wallpaper.

As you can see, Tags support together with the Smart Orientation feature is a powerful combination.

The following new features have been implemented in Wallpaper Cycler:

• WPC now remembers which wallpaper categories and layout categories are expanded or not.
• Added option for auto-save after auto-sync.
• Double click on the “time until next cycle” pane in the statusbar will open the cycling settings dialog.
• A red “Skipped Cycles” pane in the statusbar will display the number of skipped cycles due to CPU load monitoring once a cycle has been skipped. When you double click that pane, the CPU load monitoring settings dialog appears.
• The thumbnails in the listview don’t display black bars anymore if the aspect ratio of the image doesn’t match the listview image aspect ratio.
• New fields for a Calendar Notes Template: Author Name, Author Email, Author Website and Theme Description, just like it already existed for Calendar Templates.
• In the screensaver you can now press the “right-arrow” key on your keyboard to advance to the next image.
• Nicer alpha blended selection of thumbnails on Windows XP or later. This can be seen in the screenshot below
  

I also made the following bug fixes for Wallpaper Cycler:

• Fixed an infinite loop on certain jpg images.
• Properly handle context menus in the tree and the wallpaper list on the main window with shift+f10.
• Fixed a crash that happened sometimes when calculating desktop icon background color.

I just finished implementing the “Give Tags Hotkey” feature in NuonSoft Wallpaper Cycler. With this feature you can define system wide hotkeys to give certain tags to the current wallpaper on your desktop. Multiple tags can be configured for each hotkey. You can define as many of these hotkeys as you want. The following is a screenshot of the configuration page for this new feature.

A “Give Tags hotkey” can also be configured to show a menu with all your tags. With this menu you can quickly add/remove tags to/from the current wallpaper. When you configure such a hotkey a menu like the following will be shown:

In this post I’m going to describe the new Tag Support in the upcoming version of Wallpaper Cycler. Tags can be assigned to individual wallpapers, layouts, categories and/or layout categories. Wallpaper Cycler supports the notion of tag inheritance. For example: if you specify a tag on an individual wallpaper and on the category of that wallpaper, the wallpaper will have both tags. By allowing you to specify tags on layouts and/or layout categories, you can create layouts that will only be used for wallpapers with a specific tag. With this you can for example assign tags Landscape and Portrait to your wallpapers and create a different layout to be used for landscape or portrait wallpapers.

It’s very easy to specify tags for a wallpaper or layout. You can quickly select the tags you want with the new Tags section in the bar on the right of the main window which you can see in the screenshot below.

This tags section allows you to place a checkmark in front of the tags that you want for the selected wallpaper(s) and you can also use that section to quickly type in new tags separated by a comma. The “Show tags details…” link will open a new window that will show you all the tags and all inherited tags of the selected wallpaper(s). You can also configure the size of this tags section to fit your liking.

There is also a tags editor which looks like in the following screenshot:

The tags editor allows you to add new tags, delete existing tags, rename existing tags or to combine several tags into one new tag. All changes done in this tags editor will automatically be reflected on all places in Wallpaper Cycler where tags are used.

Wallpaper objects in a layout can now be configured to display a random wallpaper with a specific tag.

Wallpaper Cycler includes the following predefined tags: Landscape, Portrait and Square. One of these will automatically be assigned to new wallpapers. These tags are also used in a new feature called “Smart Orientation” which I will explain in another post.

The following new features have been implemented in Wallpaper Cycler: 

• Option to disable the synchronization results balloon.
• Weekend coloring for the calendar notes bar.
• New “Delete Wallpapers” which removes selected wallpapers from the list + deletes them physically. The “Delete Wallpapers” from previous version is now called “Remove Wallpapers From List”.
• Restructured the tray menu.

Wallpaper Cycler now includes the following extra hotkeys:

• A hotkey to toggle desktop icons. 
• A hotkey “Open current wallpaper” + tray menu item
• A hotkey “Open current wallpaper in Explorer” + tray menu item
• A hotkey “Remove current wallpaper from list and Cycle” + tray menu item
• A hotkey “Delete current wallpaper and Cycle” + tray menu item

I also made the following bug fixes today for Wallpaper Cycler:

• If you started a folder synchronize manually and at the same time WPC starts synchronizing automatically, all new images were added twice.
• Cycle at times were not always working.
• Mutual exclusive ‘cycle at’ or ‘cycle with delay’ -> you cannot enable both anymore to prevent problems.
• The “Remove” button for cycle-at-times was only enabled when more than 1 item was selected.

I just finished implementing the “Move To Category Hotkey” feature in NuonSoft Wallpaper Cycler. With this feature you can define system wide hotkeys to move the current wallpaper on your desktop to a predefined wallpaper category. You can define as many of these hotkeys as you want. The following is a screenshot of the configuration page for this new feature.

A “Move To Category hotkey” can also be configured to show a hierarchical menu of all your categories from which you select the category to which you want to move the current wallpaper. When you configure such a hotkey a menu like the following will be shown: