Tempates can greatly change look-and-feel of your wallpaper. Templates can be activated via the
tray menu or preferences. An active template adds additional functionality or useful and even
interactive objects to your wallpaper. Each active template adds special items to the WireChanger
tray menu. This provides a quick way to change template options and to edit template-related
data.
Let's look at the basic templates in WireChanger (Some of them and many others are placed at our web-site here:
Additional templates).
- Calendar. This template adds a semi-transparent interactive calendar to your background. The
calendar is highly customizable and even skinnable. You can add text notes to the cells of the
calendar by double clicking it right on your desktop. If you change the color of the note's edit
window, the corresponding cell will use the new color too. To add notes for future dates (that
are not visible on calendar), double click calendar's title.
- Citations. This template places a random citation on your wallpaper every time it changes.
Double-clicking on a citation will open the citation's file which you can edit and add your own
favorite citations. Hand-edited citations will not be overwritten when you update to a new
version of WireChanger.
- Image mosaic. This template creates a mosaic from your wallpaper. Mosaics can be created from
mirrored and/or random images.
- Memo pad. This template adds a note pad to the background for the current date and includes
information about famous people that were born on that day. You can add text of your own by
double-clicking the memo pad or choosing the corresponding item from the tray menu.
- Online quotation. This is the same as Citations (above) but the qoutations are taken from an
Internet site, so this template will be active only when you are connected to the Internet. If
you know links to interesting quotation sites, please send them to us. We will consider them for
additions to future releases.
- CNN News. Put the latest news from the CNN Website on your desktop. You must be online to use
this template.
- Second picture. This template adds a small, semi-transparent preview of a random image from
your collection in the corner of the current wallpaper.
- Special effects. You can turn you desktop background into black-and-white artistic paper or
emboss it or apply several other interesting effects.
- Picture in Picture. This template will blend two images into one. This one can be very funny.
- Weather forecast. This template adds a special icon with temperature, wind speed, etc., for
today or tomorrow. Default values are for Moscow, Russia. You can change the city code. To find
the code for the city of your choice, visit www.gismeteo.ru. Find your city and look at the URL
of the page. The numbers in the URL will be your code. You can find some of the major cities of the world here
- Web camera. This adds a semi-transparent image from the URL of your choice. You must be
connected to the Internet to use this template. By default, this template will show you a random
image from our Website at WiredPlane.
Some notes about transparency: It is better not to use transparency under Windows 98 or ME
because they do not support transparency natively. So it is advisable to set opacity to 100%.
Windows 2000, Windows XP, and higher do support transparency.
For developers
A template is a simple HTML page or page with a special draw script with preprocessing commands
which wraps your wallpaper with different effects. Templates will be applied even to images that
are installed as wallpaper from other programs. You can find all templates in the Template folder
in WireChanger's installation directory (*.wpt files). You can add new templates easily - just
use existing template files as examples. Remember that additional files used by WireChanger are
cached for performance purposes, so if you add/remove any strings to/from them, you must restart
the application.
