Create a spanning wallpaper

So I have expanded my setup recently to six screens, and one of the fun things about having a lot of screens is that you can make a wallpaper span across all of them. There are apps that do that, but they can’t span across different computers. Here’s to do it the manual way.

To do this we will take a single large wallpaper and split it up into individual pictures for wallpapers for each screen that you are spanning across.

1. Pick a picture

The wallpaper doesn’t have to be too large, but one that was made to fit a very large monitor always goes best. I’m using an image that is 1920 pixels wide.


2. Find screen resolutions

This is an extremely important step in the process so you know the proportional size of each chunk of your source image. The resolution can be found in the display preferences of every computer (or screen resolution preferences). Here’s the resolution of all of my screens:

Once you have that all worked out, time to break out photoshop.

3. Cut your pictures

Warning you: this step takes a little while.

Before you can start cutting your photos, you need to know the proportions of your screens. This can be done with a good old fraction simplifier.

Just visit this site and put in your width into the top of the fraction and the height into the bottom. Then select to have the result as an improper fraction. You may want to name each screen screen 1, screen 2, and so on. Find the result of each screen resolution.

Then, open your source picture in photoshop. Select the rectangular marquee tool and where it says style select fixed ratio. Where it says width and height put in the top and bottom of the fraction you got out of the simplifier.

I’m going to start with my first screen which is 1280X1024, which according to the magic simplifier comes down to 5/4. So I am going to put 5 and 4 into photoshop, then start to select what you would like to be for your first screen. Because my first screen is the top left, I want to select in the top left of the picture.

Once you have the selection, create a new document called wall1 and make it the size of your first monitor.

So now you need to go back to where you made your selection and hit copy, Then, take your paintbrush tool and color over it. This is so that when you make selections in the future you know where your screen will be.

Then, go into that new blank document you created and paste it. Use the free transform tool and move the edges of the pasted selection to the edges of the canvas. Save and repeat for every single one of your screens.

Done yet?

If so, you should have  a bunch of files named wallX.psd (which you should also convert to JPG) and a bunch of black squares on your source file.

Now you have to distribute those files to the appropriate computers. You may have to use a USB stick but I have FTP and a web server so that makes it easy.

Once you have all of the wallpapers set your result may vary depending on the spacing or irregularity of your monitors. With mine you can still see it but not that well.

My Oats

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otzvfjT59Os&hl=en&fs=1]
Not what you think. This Web Service Is for creating your own wallpaper images.

This pretty much takes your mouse patterns which you draw and puts them into a cool symmetrical pattern. Many modes, many things you can do with it. You can select specific colors for the design as well as the background of it. And even, you can put it into photoshop and stick I don’t know, a logo into it (click for Good Morning Geek My Oats wallpaper!)? This is fun, and easy to do even with your eyes closed!
A cool thing about this is that it can link to a couple of other things.
1. It uses colors. and if you want to know what your color is, try out colourism.com! Simple. Put in your name and date and birth and it will tell you your color and complimentary color. That’s how I made that GMGMOWP (Good Morning Geek My Oats WallPaper) I mentioned above.
2. It doesn’t need to be a web app. What about Fluid (clickable)? It will become your own desktop application. I did try it using a web archive file and downloading doesn’t work. What’s the purpose of making a wallpaper if you can’t use it?
My Oats requires Adobe Flash player.
Free, online, no registration required!

Wallsaver

Here’s it simple-

Wallsaver puts a screensaver as your desktop.
I use it all of the time, with my LotsaWater screensaver, which takes a screenshot of your screen and makes ripples over it. the only problem with using the screenshot feature with wallsaver is that when something moves on your dock with wallsaver enabled, Then the same thing of when you didn’t click on it will be there too. so thats wy I just used some image behind it. in this case, a cool apple spotlight picture. this one.
But to have wallsaver  use lotsawater is very hard. What you have to do is open the .saver file in system preferences, change it in system preferences to have the apple image under the options button, then it will actually modify the .saver file itself. then, you need to open the folder containing the .saver file in finder, at the same time as haveing wallsaver open then click and drag the file from the folder in finder to the wallsaver window. I enabled the aoutoactivte as well as the hide after activation, then on top of that had wallsaver open on startup, so the window would appear, then the wallsaver would activate, then the wallsaver window would disappear again. also, you can quit the application and the wallsaver wil still be in activation. also, after you sleep/close the lid of your mac it will still be activated when you open it back up, even without the wallsaver application running.
Here are the download locations.
LotsaWater:
Wallsaver:

Desktopia

Here’s the bottom line:

Desktopia is an application where you can set different background pictures for different times, in which you can specify.
here is a screenshot of the controller.

It’s pretty basic, but incredibly convenient.
It only has one flaw: That it doesn’t work unless the app itself is running. 
Now, what you see in the screenshot above is not the app, its only the controller. to make it so the app runs on startup, go to the app
lications folder in Finder, find a file called desktopia, then move it to the dock. right click the dock icon, then click open at login. then, you
can drag it off of the dock. then, in the top right, there will be a flower indicating its running.
click on that icon, and click open at login. when you do that, it should look like the image below.













Thats really all there is to it. You select the image add the time, and let it do the rest.