RainWallpaper gives Windows dynamic wallpaper capabilities
RainWallpaper is a free portable software for devices running Microsoft's Windows operating system that adds dynamic wallpaper capabilities to the operating system.
Dynamic wallpapers are not an entirely new thing; Microsoft tried to sell Windows Vista Ultimate by adding a bunch of exclusives to the operating system edition. One of the exclusives was Dreamscene which provided users with options to play videos as desktop wallpapers. It did not take long for users to figure out how to run Dreamscene on other Vista editions and XP, and even on Vista's succeeding operating system Windows 7.
Third-party apps like Desktop Movie or DreamRender were created, and the video player VLC supported video backgrounds as well.
One of the latest programs to support dynamic backgrounds is the excellent Wallpaper Engine; it is not free but well worth the asking price in my opinion.
RainWallpaper
RainWallpaper has been released recently. The free portable program for Windows adds its own dynamic wallpaper engine to the Windows operating system. The download sits at around 100 Megabytes right now; it includes four different dynamic wallpapers that users can switch between immediately, and options to install new wallpapers from the active DeviantArt group.
The wallpaper that you see on the screenshot above is dynamic in nature. Since it is impossible to capture the dynamic nature of wallpapers with images, it is probably best to see the introductory video of RainWallpaper created by the developers.
The software loads one of the backgrounds right away when you start it on the Windows machine. You have two main options to interact with the program:
- Control some of its functionality from the System Tray icon.
- Control it from the main interface.
The system tray icon displays various options: use it to select a new wallpaper to display, to open the settings, to mute or pause wallpapers, or to create your own custom dynamic wallpapers.
The main interface displays all available wallpapers and options to discover new dynamic wallpapers. It loads the DeviantArt page of the group and displays all available wallpapers. A click on download on any page adds it as a new wallpaper to the program. New wallpapers are published to the group regularly. You can pick from a wide selection of themes such as high tech, featured, landscapes, or games.
Settings are pretty straightforward. Wallpapers are paused automatically when full screen apps like games are run. Mute is enabled as well and the program is set to run on system start. You can control the volume, language, and monitor the dynamic wallpaper is displayed on as well from the Settings.
RainWallpaper supports two different types of dynamic wallpapers that you may create. You may create video wallpapers or web wallpapers. Video wallpapers take a video file -- wmv, avi, mp4 and move are supported -- and turns it into a dynamic wallpaper. Web wallpapers require an HTML file on the other hand.
The options are quite powerful. You can create animations from static images, and create interactive wallpapers that accept mouse input or sound.
As far as resource usage is concerned, RainWallpaper uses quite a bit of RAM and some CPU while running. It depends a lot on the loaded dynamic wallpaper image but memory usage was about 150 Megabytes during tests.
Closing Words
RainWallpaper is an excellent program for Windows that you may use to create and load dynamic wallpapers. The wallpapers are displayed for as long as RainWallpaper runs in the background.
The option to create your own dynamic wallpapers is a welcome addition even though I had some issues figuring out how to close the creation interface as it did not come with a close button.
