We are all preparing to see what Microsoft can offer for a solution to the animated desktop that they are supposedly working on for the Windows Vista release. In the mean time Vista testers can, mostly for sheer amusement, set a screensaver as your desktop’s background.
I Started Something put together a tutorial for manually doing it but the easiest way is to just use this application that someone created and doesn’t require any installation (screenshot above). It has several settings and will retrieve a list of your current screensavers…which means you can put a slideshow of pictures on your desktop if you wish!
Here is a screencast that I Started Something put together and about 1-minute into it you can see this in action:
The only downside to doing this is that it will not allow you to access your desktop shortcuts or folders. The screensaver is displayed on top of them but you will still have access to your sidebar gadgets.
I won’t be using this too much but will be cool to show people.
AH thank you Ryan!! About a month ago I was looking for something like this and couldn’t find it
And for those of you who still use Windows XP, try this: [vital-desktop.sourceforge.net] It does exactly the same as the program that Ryan described.
Interesting…I never knew you could do it with Windows XP. That looks even better because the screenshot still shows you have access to your files and folders.
And for those of you that use Mac OS X there’s a program called “[freshlysqueezedsoftware.com] except this program lets you have access to your desktop icons. The only problem is it doesn’t work with the new screensaver format used by the RSS Visualizer screensaver.