Dynamic / Live / Active Desktop Background Software

[smarties11]

Hi All,

 

We'll be starting our Windows 10 rollout in September, and I'm wondering if anyone here knows of any software that can be used to dynamically create a desktop background based on a set of user defined parameters?

 

A bit of context - here we use the desktop background for various things. It displays current house points, how many pages we've printed this academic year and how many trees that has used, word of the week with translations into FR, SP and DE, book of the month and a weekly maths puzzle. Presently, each Friday evening I update the background ready for the following week. This is saved in NETLOGON, I have a GPP file policy created to copy this to the local machine and then use a GPO to set the desktop background to the local file. This works well and it is fully embedded in our school.

 

There are of course some problems, and one of the main things I hate about this method is that we have a variety of different display resolutions. There's nothing more annoying that a stretched desktop background (having said this, no one has complained!) I did once look into creating a separate file each resolution, have all of these copied by GPP and then use a script on the machine to determine the current resolution and then apply the file for that resolution. But that came with issues, namely identifying all the resolutions in use (I came up with a list of about 10) and then also not being able to account for resolutions set by user - so this was abandoned. Also, it's a pain having to create the backgrounds. It would be great if these could be largely automated, with me just needing to change a central config file.

 

So, does anyone know of anything that can do this? What I'm looking for is something that can run on the client, that pulls a config file from the network with our current background config in, and then generates a JPEG and saves it to the local machine. I guess I'd expect to be able to set positions and font sizes relative to the resolution (e.g. use 20% width, 10% height, top right of screen, for house points etc). A bit like BGINFO does but obviously that's limited to system info only.

 

Another option I guess would be to have an active desktop HTML background a la Windows XP - but can't seem to find any third party software that does this?

 

Would appreciate any input :-)

 

Thanks.

[3s-gtech]

In theory, you could use a Powershell script to create the JPEG with the info you want, then use BGInfo to display it. BGInfo is also great with multiple resolutions - if you created a JPEG with a white background, and set a white background in BGInfo, you could set the JPEG to not be full screen - that way it won't stretch and will keep its aspect ratio intact.

[smarties11]

Do you mean use powershell to actually create the JPEG using the elements I require? i.e. "top right of JPEG add this text string in size 20" etc? Any ideas how I would do that?

 

Ideally I don't want to use a centralised background image as I want to use the full width and height of the screen. I'd rather be able to get the client to dynamically create the JPEG based on the set centralised parameters.

 

I appreciate I might be asking for the impossible!

 

Thanks.

[3s-gtech]

No. You'd render a page with html or xml, some sort of markup that you can apply style to. Then snap it as JPEG - it looks like PHP may be the tool for this. Then BGInfo or similar to apply it. The load on the server creating this would be low if it's not dynamically creating these all the time - if you wanted to customise the background for each user on logon (say, by showing a timetable) it'd be pretty heavy.

[smarties11]

Hmmm, interesting. I like that idea. Create a responsive HTML page that looks good at any resolution and then screenshot it at full screen, save as JPEG and then apply. Good idea. I'll do some investigating!