Android apps on Rails

The desktop background switcher included with Karmic Koala has a cool feature, a wallpaper slideshow that rotates images at a predetermined interval. However, getting it to cycle through your own set of images isn’t exactly user friendly. In order to get a sequence of images to display, the wallpaper picker must be supplied with an xml file with the following structure:

        1795.0
        /path/to/image1.jpg
 
        5
        /path/to/image1.jpg
        /path/to/image2.jpg
 
        1795.0
        /path/to/image2.jpg
 
        5
        /path/to/image2.jpg
        /path/to/image1.jpg

Where all paths are absolute. The xml file can be chosen as a wallpaper in the standard gnome wallpaper picker by going pressing add and choosing “All files” from the file filter drop down.

To make the process of creating these xml files a bit simpler, I made a python script that takes all images in a directory and generates an xml file for them. To use it, simply run it in the directory where the images are located and it will generate a file called “desktop.xml”. The default transition time is 1795 seconds (30 minutes). To change the switch time, supply the new interval in seconds as an argument:

./ubuWallGen 1200

You can get the latest version of the script using git:

git clone git://github.com/royvandewater/ubuWallGen.git

You can also download the script directly here