15-Minute Reviews :: WireChanger v3.6.5

Hello all and welcome to today’s 15-Minute Review! Today’s application is WireChanger version 3.6.5 by WiredPlane Labs – A desktop image manager and rotator, with desktop widgets.

Software Description

As Giveaway of the Day states:

“WireChanger is a Wallpaper manager that includes built-in utilities, templates, calendar and the option to add active clocks to your desktop. WireChanger offers you total and complete solution to manage your own desktop wallpapers, especially If you want to see something fresh every time you minimize your applications.

You may never see the same picture twice on your desktop! The main idea of this software is to set images on wallpaper with additional random effect applied to background. Animate your desktop with real clocks. Organize yourself with clickable wallpaper notes and calendar with reminders for important dates.”

Quick Pros

• Does rotate images smoothly
• A large assortment of editable widgets handy – Calendar, memopad, citations, news readers, etc.
• Ability to organize images into themes handy for quickly changing your motif
• Ability to attach a frequency to different themes for increased or decreased rotation

Quick Cons

• Settings window as well as for widgets a bit awkward
• No way to ‘pair’ images for dual monitor support – Dual monitor support a bit lax
• Widgets will not move onto second monitor
• Random bugs occassionally crop up
• Why does it need to ask confirmation to close twice?

Expansion

Image rotators are a handy way to give your desktop some liveliness. This application allows you to rotate images at a set time period as well as tosses desktop widgets into the works with a large assortment of widgets. This application is smooth and quick about its rotations and not too bad of a resource hog.

There are a large assortment of widgets to add to your desktop; Some which go on their own when you get their initial settings up and running such as clocks, citations, RSS feeds and such; Some with the ability to change with you a little more on the fly including memopad, calendar and more. One issue I did have with the widgets was the fact that I could not move them onto my second screen at all; I would move the positioning box to that screen and click ‘Save and Close’

There is ‘theme’ support in the application. You can group your images into themes, which from there you can quickly alter if they are in your rotation or not, their frequency of use and package the themes for sending onto another computer (or archiving seasonal images.)

While the application works pretty well (Especially in a single-screen situation,) I did have some issues with the application. First off, the settings boxes (Both the global preferences as well as the widgets settings) are unwieldly. I ended up having to resize all of the settings windows larger and resize the columns so I could just read the text of each setting. The settings sometimes are not descriptive enough to explain how they affect different aspects of the application (Such as the pattern method option.)

Dual-monitor support, as noted above already once, is very weak (and no specific support for additional screens beyond 2.) There are three settings for dual-monitor support: From Main Monitor, Random, and Next In Order. The last two settings ends up being quirky at some point. If you set it to random and you change your primary screen’s image manually, it changes the secondary screen randomly, and there is no way to manually change the second screen. Next in order could have been useful at some level; However, it ends up instead of going to the next one from the one randomly chosen, but to two away from the one currently picked for the main screen. It would have been nice if there was a way to ‘pair’ images together so they would populate the screens together instead of trying to handle the results of the last two options or having the bland Windows-default add the image to both screens.

I also had some random bugs crop up as well; First time I ran the application, it wouldn’t let me access the ‘Download Exchange’ service; It kept telling me that the image couldn’t be used, even with my own images. The second time I launched the application, I had no issues with getting to the ‘Download Exchange.’ A few image rotations into using the application the second time, and suddenly the application was splitting images: Taking half of the image meant for the left screen and half of the image meant for the right screen, stuck them together and planted it on both screens the same way (And the widget ended up on the opposite side of my primary screen with this too.) All this one took was to close and reopen the application. Add to this: Why do we need two different ‘Do you really want to quit’ dialog boxes?

Final Verdict

While the concept behind this application is great, it does fall short in a few aspects including ease-of-use as well as dual-monitor support. A lot of people are picking up second monitors these days and the lack of dual-monitor support could be a pretty big downfall. The random bugs as well are a bit of an irritant (I wonder how many are linked to dual-screen support as well.) For free and for single-screen, this may be a gem for you. For dual-screen, I’d steer clear and use an application like UltraMon to manage your own wallpapers; It may not randomly change your images, but it is smart enough to handle your wallpaper respectably. As for paying $19.99, it may not be a bad deal for single-screeners, if you can chew off the settings without bothering you. For dual-screeners, I’d recommend hanging onto your cash for now.

Posted by BladedThoth on Sunday, May 27, 2007