Designing a Config for the Evolving Circle Wallpaper

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For the last few days, I’ve been working on the live wallpaper I recently released.

I had been thinking about allowing configuration of the wallpaper, even if it was only via a text file. I ended up deciding to try my hand at using Glade to create a GUI, something I had been meaning to do for a while.

The wallpaper config window, loaded with Glade.

The wallpaper config window, loaded with Glade.

Glade is an extremely useful tool for visually constructing your interface, and it made experimenting with GTK significantly less daunting. The creation and placement of the visual elements is done by the editor. Coupled with Quickly, it takes very little work to get started. I found this video guide particularly helpful for basic information. That being said, it was difficult to find a few pieces of specific information – I spent hours tracking down a colour-object constructor, for example, to pre-set the colour wheel’s colour.

The gradient version of the wallpaper.

The gradient version of the wallpaper.

I decided to release the evolving circle wallpaper as v0.3.0 with the config so far, which consists of one, requested feature: the ability to change the background colour. The user can either choose the purple-gradient default, or select a flat colour.

evolving-circle-wallpaper-config-window

Future configurable aspects include the speed of colour changes, the range of colours, and the opacity of the circles (the latter two being important with user-chosen background colours). I may make the movement speed variable, but with the current version of movement, there is a narrow range between “almost no change ever” and “tacky transitions”, so this may take longer to deliver.

Another feature I would like to deliver is the ability to automatically add gradients to the background, because it makes a big difference to the quality. The default background has four layers with hints of colour: white, pink, orange and black, each one focused in a corner. Something like this would be easy to automate, generating the colour gradients by shifting the hex value “left” and “right”.

Screenshot from 2013-02-07 10:26:09

Evolving Circle Wallpaper

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The Ubuntu phone.

The Ubuntu phone.

I’ve created a dynamic wallpaper, inspired by the lock screen on the Ubuntu phone. The Ubuntu phone’s lock screen displays various statistics about your usage, with a unique background with different colours and placements.

The one I created isn’t based on any particular statistics – it’s random. The positions of the outer circles slowly change at random, and their colour changes from pink to orange and back over the course of several hours. The ring of dots in the main circle acts as a 12-hour clock, turning white up to noon, then fading out up to midnightScreenshot from 2013-02-06 21:20:58Screenshot from 2013-02-07 10:26:09

Screenshot from 2013-02-07 07:39:08Screenshot from 2013-02-09 08:10:04

(A note to those who are looking at the time: I reset the colour/positions in most of those screenshots – it doesn’t change that fast)

The PPA is here. For an easy install: sudo add-apt-repository ppa:muscovy/ppa && sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install evolving-circle-wallpaper

It automatically adds itself to the list of wallpapers in the Appearance window. It also sets the circle positions and colour randomly, so it’s unique from the moment you install it.

I have a few ideas to tweak it – using some variant of an Ubuntu wallpaper for a background, making different circles be slightly different colours, and so on.