So, the default wallpaper…
My initial vision:
Seeing so many screenshots of the Ubuntu desktop during the second to last release all sporting identical backdrops, made me wonder: wouldn’t it be amazing if all our users received (or evolved) subtly different wallpapers – not radically enough to dilute the intent but just enough to become an elegant addition to the OS and give a sense of personalisation.
Ideally they might not even notice at first but would become aware and pleasantly surprised by catching the differences out of the corner of their eye, double-taking the position of a particularly prominent graphic in relation to another, a subtle hue shift over the course of hours/days/weeks or wondering why their desktop image wasn’t the same as either their friend’s or someone who’s screenshot they’d just seen in a recent blog post.
If nothing else it would be a relatively inexpensive experiment that could offer the start of something new and would be a great celebration of the individuality and diversity of our user base.
The reality:
With the advent of the new visual identity and my involvement therein, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to look into this idea in more detail. The Lucid wallpaper was specifically designed with this purpose in mind. It deliberately used little more than simple radial blurs layered to give an impression of light and depth – where the position of elements would not act negatively against the composition and that we imagined would be easy to animate and move programatically without causing rendering/artefacting issues across a wide range of screen sizes – it was always going to be a fine balancing act but worth it in our opinion.
There are a number of ways we could have done this. We decided to look at having a matching screensaver that would re-write the default wallpaper whenever the user woke their machine from sleep, this seemed like the easiest way to avoid unnecessary processor cycles or unexplained delays (possibly at startup/shutdown). This would also allow us to do a very clean crossover effect between desktop and screensaver where open windows, etc. would elegantly fade away and visa versa.
Sadly we have been unable to allocate the time to get this built internally. I discussed it in a session at the last UDS and there is an open blueprint relating to it. I am still one hundred percent behind pursuing this idea and am actively seeking people to help me make it a reality.
If you’d like to help please get in touch.
Easy and yet appealing with having a layered approach. Take 4 layers, each in one file with a high opacity at the right places and join them with any of the standard libraries like GD or ImageMagick after applying some slight rotation and scaling to each of the layers to make a complete image.
Trigger it with the autostart to get a new image every time or with a cronjob to change it every few minutes. If you want it to be more subtle, use a curve for defining the amount of rotation and scale with the uptime as measurement…
I’ve thought about this idea quite often, too, but had a more generic approach with displaying videos in the background, that have some small yet visible motion, e.g. a thin leaf with water dropping every now and then or some grass that would slightly wave in the wind or something like that. But that would be a lot more to do.
Thank you for taking the time to discuss your ideas and plans for the wallpaper. I for one appreciate all the work you and everyone else puts into Ubuntu. Keep up the good work.
i am pretty sure gnome can display an SVG as a wall paper (if not then it should be implemented).
SVG is as easy to modify programmably as HTML. as few lines of $YOUR_FAVOURITE_SCRIPTING_LANGUAGE could easily adjust colours, positions, blurs etc.
I was thinking that it would be neat to modify the wall paper on install.. e.g. depending on different options that the user selected in the install, it would modify the wall paper slightly. Thus, each user would come up with a completely different wallpaper that was dynamically created based on certain values in the install.
I think the SVG idea was great, as it is very simple to create a script to create an SVG, and it could also be changed over time.
All in all, I think it is a really good idea.
Thank you! It’s nice to see that you care about the default wallpaper! :) Excellent idea, I don’t know what I could say more. :) Sadly I can’t help you, I’m not a programmer… :( I’m a photographer and I can draw something with GIMP, however other people are so much better in that.
I’m hoping this idea soon will become reality. Good luck! ;)
This idea sounds really hot.
I like the 10.04 a LOT and it would be pawnage to have it more “fluid & refreshed” so it wouldn’t get old anytime soon.
Good luck!
I immediately thought of this, http://jonls.dk/redshift/
You might want to look at E17 they use animation in their wallpapers.
Good luck, Hope to see this soon. ^_^
Why not let the user select the default wallpaper (like picking from 5 options) on the installation (further hinting to the use how customizable Ubuntu is), this wallpaper can be used as the background for the installation too.
Curious to see you writing about backgrounds and not mention the new maverick wallpaper being the most controversial Ubuntu wallpaper ever made.
Maybe you should run a wallpaper contest like the KDE folk?
Was thinking the same as Greg. That said, the idea of custom backgrounds would help against that… maybe.
I really like the idea of animated/adaptive backgrounds though.
animated backgrounds can be a big power drain. modern CPUs can drop in to low power modes when there is nothing going on. forcing the CPU to wake up to refresh the background 30 times a second hurts this.
for an extreme example http://mjg59.livejournal.com/102406.html
Thanks for this sharing, i am searching animated backgrounds, have u any link? i like this site because its keep me update.
http://www.loverhugs.com
@Lars: Thank you for your input, that should work. We did have problems getting SVGs to render correctly on the desktop though (blurs did not render correctly as I remember) which was why we thought of linking it to a screensaver. Need to investigate further… I do like your ideas for the leaf/grass btw.
@duanedesign: You’re welcome :)
@Isaac: Hadn’t thought of that, nice idea.
I just wanted to clarify that I don’t see the wallpaper as being visibly animated (if you were staring at it for a while) but that over the course of time it would very slowly change (and differently for each individual).
ooh, it can do an .svg! that would be awesome, scaleable wallpaper for all screen sizes, plus you could easily tweak the algorithm so it moves a bit every reboot or something.
You promised a post about the default wallpaper. Yet no word on if you current default wallpaper will be changed this cycle.
Even though that’s what most people care about.
And it is changed, or every review out there, first changes the wallpaper to something else. It seems to be the later.
Which should be a sign. Nobody likes the ugly wallpaper. The here is nice. But before planning a wedding with a pretty bride, could you please, first, break up with the ugly vomit monster from hell.
Officially.
“THE UBUNTU DESIGN TEAM HEREBY OFFICIALLY DECLARES THE DEFAULT WALL PAPER WILL NOT BE VOMIT STYLE”
Something to that extent would be great. Thanks.
@meneer it certainly isn’t a wallpaper that will go down in history like the Hardy one, but there is no need to go over the top about it. Right click, change desktop background, pick another one. Personally I would like to see something Meerkatish about it, but there have been unexciting wallpapers before. Maybe there will be a different one for release, maybe not.
Back to the topic of the default wallpaper, it seems when selecting a .svg it actually renders it to a bitmap at a resolution somehow coming from the size of the svg using some Gnome rendering process. That then gets scaled to the screen size. This isn’t as nice as I had hoped because it won’t be an interactive object on the desktop and I can see why blurs and so on might not be supported by whatever the rendering path is. Would be nice to fix it so a real .svg can be used as the desktop background.
I agree it’s easy to change.
But we have to hope that all sites that review Ubuntu will change it before posting screenshots, or Ubuntu’s popularity will quickly fade.
Secondly, most people are physically there when I install Ubuntu for them. The first impression is going to be horrible, i’m likely have to go and spin a special ubuntu version with a decent wallpaper. Because I can’t undo that first experience. They are going to think they’ve made a mistake. It’s look childish and amateuristic.
Which would give us another 5 years of all kinds of niche linux distrobutions, without any clear standard. There should be one major distrobution.
And rather than a clear statement, about the default wallpaper they are dreaming out loud of what they might someday do in the future.
In the relevant bug report and the ayatana mailing list they are not actually discussing any arguments against the wallpaper, but they are deciding exactly how offended they are that people that don’t like their creation.
Somehow, they get it into their heads that when somebody criticizes their work, it’s automatically insulting and breaks the CoC.
Can you imagine application developers acting like this? How dare you say the program crashed!
They need to grow a pair, or never ever share their work with the public.
I really wonder why Canonical is paying people to get their panties in a bunch. Aren’t they supposed to take responsibility of the design? Isn’t that what their wages pay for? Maybe i’m mistaken, maybe they get paid to defend their fragile ego’s. I’m not sure.
I just wished they hired people with a professional background, that know how to handle themselves.
The communication is horrible concerning this incident (and it’s not the first time). And their attitude is more typical of underground niche hobbyist linux distrobutions, with battling ego’s, than paid professionals, that are capable of considering criticisms of their work not as personal attacks, but as opinions. And majority opinion really should matter, when the product is commercial and needs to, for commercial purposes, to be liked by that same general population.
Somehow, they act like ‘this is our project’ and ‘we don’t have to explain ourselves to you’ or even care about your satisfaction. We are just doing this for ourselves.
It’s not your hobby project. Some of us are paying customers of Canonical. It’s a commercial project, and the word ‘community’ isn’t something you can use to silence or single out criticism you don’t like.
I wonder if Mark or the current CEO is aware of this behavior, and if the design people keep their job, when they are being pointed out that lack of priorities, there completely disregard in communication and their lack of respect towards both potentional and current customers.
Oh and Alan, it’s not the unexciting thing.
It’s that the colors don’t match. It’s scientifically proven to be ugly. People will actually get raised blood pressure from looking at clashing colors too long.
If they would just replace it with a single color, I would already be happy. I haven’t liked some of the previous wallpapers. But there is difference between taste and a general upsetting wallpaper.
PS. Does nobody on the design team ever take a class on Colors? Or don’t they even have a proper background or something.
Should we start a fundraiser to get those guys and gals into a proper class. There are thousands of books, courses, and places where you can learn about these things?
Perhaps, not pointing directly to the wallpaper but paying for a course or something prevents this whole oh-no-they-dont-like-my-work-i-am-now-offended behavior?
Perhaps that the diplomatic way to go about making them change their minds?
SVGs are working perfectly here with blur and transparency. It should be pretty straightforward to write a script to change the amount of blur, radius of circles, opacity, etc. The only question is about how artistic it will look.
While the idea is interesting and surely relatively easy to implement, artistically it would be crap. Even with an abstract wallpaper, there’s no place for randomness. If you just move objects and change hues randomly, it’ll look like garbled crap.
If you have a way to programmatically generate an artistically sound wallpaper, that would be amazingly cool, but I seriously doubt that you do.
See my video:
http://doctormo.org/2010/09/03/random-genetic-wallpaper/
Here’s a nicer thing to take inspiration from: geometric shapes.
http://www.wincustomize.com/explore/dream/292
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ajsOZ0dtxo
Basically, that thing is an OpenGL or D3D (not sure which) video wallpaper called “Expanding Shapes”. It can draw squares, circles, question marks, and some other shape I’m not remembering.
We wouldn’t need to really have it animated; we could just composite them periodically. It’d be best with a less-obnoxious background color.
The current wallpaper looks like somebody spilled baby food (to state things overly nicely) on the Lucid wallpaper.
Well, I wrote my proof of concept python script: http://pastebin.com/cRhgWupE
At the moment, it randomly generates everything so artistically, it looks fairly terrible as Tommy Brunn said it would but this is just a start. I’ve put a few comments in the script about how to improve it design wise.
It would probably make more sense to use some environmental factors rather than making it totally random. Something like using the users location/language and maybe computer hardware(?) as input for the position, size, blur, opacity, etc would be more interesting. I don’t think that it would be too difficult to get it looking nice; it should be easy enough to make it look like the lucid wallpaper (but I couldn’t find the source for it) with a twist.
Martin Owens, your implementation is a lot nicer and probably more to the point but anyway :)
I really do not think that the idea of an ever changing view of strange vomit is all that appealing. The static wallpaper is horrible enough.
Android has live wallpapers, it’d be awesome if Ubuntu did also.
In fact, I’ve already taken videos of fountains and things with the intent of using them as my wallpaper.
Gnome allows programmatically altering the wallpaper via an xml file specifying how several images are composed based upon the time; OpenSuse had this as an option a while back (darker). If anyone has any good ideas I could implement it. This would work well, without significant resource usage and would be less flaky than using the wallpaper.
I think the easiest way to do this would be to make a vector graphic (I’m guessing that’s what the 10.04 one was) and have a cronjob or something edit parameters like specific shades, positions, etc. Maybe it would be best if something rendered a .png out of it, because whenever I’m playing with svg wallpapers, I’ve noticed little oddities between the bitmap and GNOME’s rendering of the svg.
Otto,
Skimming through the comments the one I feel adds the most value is permitting the user to choose a default wallpaper. I don’t believe it would take much effort to complete this task.
For your reference, the Fedora community tried a wallpaper which changed to the time of day. Although the idea was well received it did not persist beyond one (?) release.
Discovering the aspect ratio and selecting an image to match would open the door to designs which depend upon aspect ratio and IMO add value to Ubuntu.
John
Say, where the heck did my post about “expanding shapes” go? If we want to do programmatic vectors, that would be a good example to look at.
if you want you can use this desktop wallpaper that I created recently …
Ubuntu version:
http://upload.centerzone.it/images/13163529549623283275.jpg
and Kubuntu version:
http://upload.centerzone.it/images/96575127892293292832.jpg
@ Martin Owens: Thank you for your ‘proof of concept’, great work, as is the later version.
I was quite disappointed with the maverick wallpaper, it seemed as if my screen was messed(liked lucid wallpaper a lot). I think you should look at Elive/E17. The wallpaper is a sort of animation and I really like it. Anyway I would prefer it if the default wallpaper for 10.10 would be adjusted just a bit
I think that this idea is very interesting and promising, but I have some doubts about the artistic viability of a Lucid-like random wallpaper. However, here is an example of what could be a great base for this project :
http://gnome-look.org/content/show.php?action=content&content=75680
I tried out the transparent PNG one, and it’s already beautiful with any gradient background that’s black at the bottom and 85 value, 100 saturation with any hueat the top. Furthermore, it conveys perfectly the idea of light, ambiance and radiance.
I would definitely use it as default, especially if it came with a very simple script that sets it to a random hue at startup and slowly changes it over time.
Sorry, two mistakes :
*I am the one who wrote the above comment, I must have copy pasted it mistakenly.
*Here is the correct link : http://gnome-look.org/content/show.php/Crunchy+Branch?content=75680
Sorry, but the purple-orange transition is quite off, so I hope the generated background uses a different color scheme. First thing I did after installing 10.10 beta was to google for the 10.04 wallpaper and use that one instead.
Two tools I like for designing color schemes are http://kuler.adobe.com/ and http://easyrgb.com/index.php?X=HARM
Looking forward to the final Meerkat wallpaper!
I like pt’s idea about user-selectable defaults. Yes, yes, yes, *please*! That would solve all the issues. Don’t like the default? You don’t have to live with it. Those of you who are devs may not remember any more how annoying it is to have something you hate about your computer that you. cannot. find. a way. to. change.
Case in point: I simply cannot stand the orange blotches in the Maverick default. The Lucid default was the first of the ubuntu wallpapers I actually liked. (Yes, I know there’s a bit of orange there too, but it’s mostly off-screen, as it were.) Sure, I can change the wallpaper. BUT: it comes up for every login. The login window itself has that appalling orange color on the nice amethyst-white background.
I have been trying for weeks now, ever since that became the default wallpaper, to change that damn login screen. I finally got a bootsplash change to work, but it reverts to the horrible orange splotches for login.
Yes, this is a matter of a couple of seconds waiting. But it’s like a maddening flea bite. And what makes it huge is that when you try to change it, there’s no easy way to do so! Meneer may sound intemperate, but he’s communicating the frustration of some of us users quite well, unfortunately.
So, yes, please, whatever you do, make user selectable the highest priority.
I see a new default wallpaper today. Better. Not such that I feel the need to instantly race off and change my login screen.
But the login windowlet itself still has that hideous orange band in it. Please, either make that thing less of an eyesore or tell us how to easily change it to something else.
You actually make it appear really easy together with your presentation however I in finding this topic to be actually one thing that I feel I’d never understand. It kind of feels too complex and very wide for me. I am taking a look forward for your subsequent put up, I will try to get the dangle of it!
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Thx for information.