Filed under: Fun, Windows, Microsoft, Beta
Another Windows 7 secret revealed; desktop to have slideshows
by Adam Maras Nov 3rd 2008 at 11:29PM
"Teach a man assembly, and he'll write device drivers for a day. Give a man a disassembler, and he'll figure out every secret hidden in the Windows 7 pre-beta."I swear, I'm never going to get tired of posting about Rafael Rivera finding cool stuff hiding in the guts of our Microsoft products. He's done it yet again; this time, Rafael has uncovered another couple of Windows 7 shell goodies people have been asking to see for quite some time now. What's the latest discovery? Rafael is coining it "Desktop Slideshow;" it's a new setting hidden away in your Personalization settings that allows you to select multiple images to create a fading slideshow on your desktop.
"But wait," you're thinking, "I can a) do that on my Mac already and b) there are third-party utilities that let me do this on my Windows PC." That's true... but can your Mac or your third-party utilities automatically pull desktop wallpapers from an RSS feed? No? Well, Windows 7 can. Check out Rafael's blog Within Windows for more details, and a tool to let the masses check out the shiny new features once he's got the finer points worked out.
Get a WordPress.com Blog
So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do.
Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game.
The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Matthew McNamara said 2:20AM on 11-04-2008
I may have missed something, but to me, you just described Desktoptopia, http://desktoptopia.com/
Reply
Samuel said 2:21AM on 11-04-2008
When Channel 9 used to (have Scoble) be good I remember an interview inside MS and there was this prat with red trainers who kept talking and talking, going on about RSS this and that. He got it, but that stuff never made it into Vista (that's what C9 was all about in those days). It looks like that guy still works there, he got it in.
I bet he's still a prat.
Reply
aristarkhos said 2:54AM on 11-04-2008
They - as in, MS - has always been a little slow to realize the usefulness of RSS. For the longest time even IE could not double up as an RSS reader.
Given the way Windows Bloatware works, I don't see what is so great about using an RSS feed to make a desktop slideshow?
Have you seen the screenshots of MSPaint and WordPad? Instead of upgrading MSPaint to something more useful they make the UI fancy. I wonder how long they think people will be fooled by their antics.
What of WinFS? Anyone seen that video on Channel 9? I guess that team was sent underground.
Reply
JamesG said 3:08AM on 11-04-2008
aristarkhos, it's only bloatware to little kids who don't understand everyone else has needs/wants as well. I like the features in Windows, and hard disks are cheap, so complaining about it is getting old. And if they improved mspaint or wordpad significantly, idiots like you would sue them into oblivion (and win in this socialist climate). And WinFS features were integrated into other products where it was found more useful, do some research THEN mouth off, not vice versa.
Reply
Hashbrown Hunter said 7:03AM on 11-04-2008
The future of porn awaits us with this new feature.
Reply
Jash Sayani said 8:45AM on 11-04-2008
Its like the new Mac app by Google......
Reply
cole said 11:08AM on 11-04-2008
Now if they could only figure out how to resize an image to fit the screen while preserving the aspect ratio. Seriously is it really that difficult?
Reply
Christian said 12:48PM on 11-04-2008
I would assume that the drop down menu for the "Picture Position" will have that option the same as the current option available in Windows Vista; well it's an option I can select in my Vista Ultimate SP1, may it be a picture or a dreamscene.