John’s Background Switcher

The other day I stumbled across this great utility from John’s Adventures called (appropriately enough) John’s Background Switcher. Let me start by saying: this is a great program!

Okay, now with that out of the way, we can talk about what makes it so great. As you probably know from my Desktop Madness series, I love wallpapers – I collect them and I change them quite often. Apparently, this habit is not unique to me. (Heck, even my MOM changes her wallpaper based on the season; though she uses Webshots to get her pictures.) So I wanted something to help me manage my growing collection of wallpapers – and to help me choose a new one to suit my ever-changing mood.

Enter John’s Background Switcher. A nice little program that sits in your system tray (sorry – the “Taskbar Notification Area“) and randomly switches your background based on criteria that you set. You can enter a few pictures in manually or set it to watch a folder (and its sub-folders, if you want) and pick a picture from there. You can double-click on the icon to change the wallpaper right away (or right-click and get more options, such as going back to the previous wallpaper) or just let it change randomly at an interval that you set (I use 15 minutes at work, 30 minutes at home).

As a bonus, the program is written by another blogger/programmer, who wrote it for himself and then decided to release it for free. What a nice guy!

So if you’re looking for something to spice up your desktop, check out John’s Background Switcher. You won’t be disappointed!

By Keith Survell

Geek, professional programmer, amateur photographer, crazy rabbit guy, only slightly obsessed with cute things.