A Windows port of Apple Mac's Mojave Dynamic Desktop feature

WinDynamicDesktop is a free open source program for Windows 10 that brings Apple Macintosh's Mojave Dynamic Desktop feature.

Mojave Dynamic Desktop is a new feature of Apple's Macintosh operating system that alters the background image of the desktop dynamically based on the time of day.

While Windows does support loading different wallpapers either natively, in Windows 10, or through third-party applications like Bcall, Wally, or Wallperizer, none as far as I know link the loading of wallpapers to the time of day.

All that happens really is that Mojave Dynamic Desktop keeps track of the time of day in the location to load different wallpaper images that depict the time of day.

WinDynamicDesktop

WinDynamicDesktop brings the feature to Windows 10. It is an open source program based on Microsoft's Net Framework that you can run right after the download. Note that Windows SmartScreen may kick in as the app is new and not widely used.

The app has a size of less than 1 Megabyte but it comes without any of the wallpapers that it uses. It will download the wallpapers on first start.

All you have to do is enter a location as it will change the desktop backgrounds on the system based on the location. You can enter town, country to set a location and maybe other location-based information such as zip codes as well but I did not try that.

Once you have done that and clicked on the set location button the wallpaper images get downloaded and set automatically by the application provided that it is running in the background.

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The application downloads and stores 16 wallpapers on the system which it loads based on the time of day. The screenshot above highlights them all; as you can see, light and shadow changes throughout the day so that you get a bright almost shadow-less image at noon and darker photos at night.

There are a couple of things that you need to be aware of:

1. The app threw exceptions regularly but it worked nevertheless.
2. It is not possible currently to use a custom set of wallpapers. You could try and replace the wallpapers with your own, not sure if that would work though (retain the name).
3. The app uses quite a bit of memory. It used 55 Megabytes on a Windows 10 Pro device running version 1803.

Closing Words

Dynamically changing the desktop background based on the time of day is certainly an interesting feature. Question is, is it worth running a 55 Megabyte of RAM using background app all the time for that? I can see this app becoming popular if the developer manages to cut RAM use a lot and introduce new functionality such as selecting custom wallpapers or time intervals.