What will the impact of animated wallpaper be?
The upcoming release of DeskScapes 2.0 opens the door to mainstream animated wallpaper
Tuesday, November 20, 2007 by Frogboy | Discussion: WinCustomize News
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With the recent announcement that DeskScapes 2.0 will be out by February and that it will work on all versions of Windows Vista, the question is no longer if but rather when will animated wallpaper be widely available. Stardock expects to release the first beta of it to Object Desktop users before Christmas and include some premium animated wallpapers (which we call "Dreams") with it.
So how mainstream will animated wallpapers become? It's an open question. Like all customization, the answer is, most people won't use it. Most people don't even change their default wallpapers. But I believe that animated wallpapers will become surprisingly popular. Here's why:
In the past month, Dreams have more entries in the top 30 than any other category other than WindowBlinds. And considering that only users of Windows Vista Ultimate can even use them at present, that's an incredible statistic. And considering how gradual Vista adoption has been overall and that Ultimate users make up only a tiny fraction of that group, one can imagine a future where animated wallpaper is quite popular.
Some people have argued that animated wallpapers are a waste of system resources. And while it is true that some animated wallpapers (particularly video ones) can use quite a bit of CPU, that's not the general case. Moreover, I remember people who thought static wallpapers were a waste because, after all, a 1024x768x24bit wallpaper used over two megabytes of memory which, back in the 90s was a lot of memory. What seems resource intensive one day seems trivial in later days.
Like regular wallpapers, the popularity of an animated wallpaper will depend on its quality. Regular wallpapers can be pretty obnoxious. Animated wallpapers have the capacity of being even more obnoxious since they move. But that doesn't mean animated wallpapers can't be compelling.
Only time will tell but I suspect that animated wallpapers will become an extremely hot commodity in the coming years. We'll see.
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Reply #42 Monday, November 26, 2007 3:29 AM
The point being: People aren't going to stick with XP forever. Therefore, your earlier argument fails: "Until Dreams is a cross platform deal, then it's "no deal" in the long run."
Well you replied to my comment, but the "No Deal" quote belongs to Rich. I personally think more hinges on ease of content creation. That said Vista adoption is slow and many will skip it. Note that when I said cross-platform, I'm including cross-version. That means you might see more wide spread use once the next Windows is out(Windows 7?), but right now Vista is the only player. Many people will skip Vista, much like what happened with Windows ME. I'm not saying it will never hit the mainstream, but it definitely won't in the short term and whether or not it will in the long term depends on a great many things that need to happen first. Having more than one platform support it sure wouldn't hurt.
In reply to Leo the Lion,
Yes it is possible, the better question would be is it feasible. You would have to build the engine from scratch, and compatibility with various video cards would no doubt cause issues. The question as to whether or not it is feasible both from a technical and business perspective would be better left to the engineers at Stardock. However since it doesn't appear that they are planning it my guess would be that it probably isn't feasible.
Reply #43 Monday, November 26, 2007 4:44 AM
Reply #44 Monday, November 26, 2007 3:48 PM
Reply #45 Thursday, December 13, 2007 10:49 AM
That is most for sure. Forward we will go.
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Reply #41 Sunday, November 25, 2007 6:43 PM
DX can be used to do some animated wallpapers and there are third party apps that can do it in XP but most slowed my PC down too much to be usable.
Brad, any thoughts about my comments about content driving mainstream acceptance?