Working on The Natural Desktop

The history

The Natural Desktop (TND) has been a long time in planning. Sometime around February whilst chatting with Matt Crockett (Tiggz) he sent me a demo of something he was working on called WOW (Window on Weather). It blew me away. Obviously now we are all familiar with Matt's talent, but at the time it was a breath of fresh air in a DX world overrun with too many average weather and calendar objects.

On my March trip over to Stardock I showed this to Brad and a few of the guys and they were equally impressed. I mentioned that I believed there was a commercial product in there somewhere and let the idea simmer.

Over the Summer Brad dropped me an email describing his vision for TND. Well, describing is probably too strong a word. As with most of the best plans they are evolutionary. With a little too-and-fro the emails began to flesh out the idea. Basically we would use Matt's DesktopX work and add complementary images and sounds. So, I went away to to flesh out Matt's object a bit, while Brad went to organise the sounds and images.

Developing the object

Basically, at this stage my work involved adding a few basic option to Matt's user interface and tidying up the object and scripts a bit. Basically Matt had worked hard on this and it was solid, but DX and my scripting ability had both moved on. As I worked I liased with Matt and he helped with the script and imagery making the object more and more solid.

It's probably worth mentioning at this point what a please it has been working with Matt. Obviously we can all see his talent, but the most important fact is that he's a genuinely nice guy. Obviously he did the lion's share of the work with the initial object, but as I have developed around it he has contributed very positively. I've no doubt that he could have done all the things I have added, but the fact that it was a team effort has certainly made it a more satisfying experience for me.

Once we had established that the imagery would be based on seasons and times of the day I put a fair bit of work into incorporating this into the user interface. It seemed sensible to adjust the color of the user interface depending on the season, and then go that little bit further by adjusting the brightness of the color based on the time of day.

Again, Matt came into his own here. I had a vision of how I thought the window could look, but as Lowry seems to be the only person to get away with drawing "matchstick men" I needed some artistic talent to make this happen. Matt created some great frames and panels that allowed me to change the hue and nicely reflect the seasonal and daily changes. A bit of experimentation with colors and finally we had some to play with.

As you do these things you suddenly come up with complications and questions. There were two things that I had to resolve here. The first was seasons. When do the seasons officially start and end? Well, Google was the star again and although there appears to be differences of opinion by a day or so this was resolved.

It then hit me that this was going to be an international object and that people in the southern hemisphere would have a distinctly different (warmer) winter to me in the north. Hemispheres were relatively easy to add but this is the kind of thing that could have been truly embarassing if I'd forgotten.

In the meantime, Brad had been away working on negotiations regrding the images and sounds. Digital Blasphemy is the logical place to find great natural artwork, but obviously there are contracts and licensing issues to deal with so Brad kindly dealt with the bulk of that.

I was provided with a range of wallpapers that Brad felt were suitable for the desktop so it was down to me to pick some to use. Originally there were going to be 3 times of the day (morning, afternoon and night), but on seeing the wallpapers I became keen to add an evening setting. The night sound would be great for evening and night, but there were so many nice wallpapers I just had to use them.

So, the script was modified to add the sounds and wallpapers. The fact that DesktopX allows for the use of ActiveX controls made the sounds really easy. I could use MP3's so we could use high quaity sounds and have a relatively long loop to avoid repetition. The Windows Media Player control also made it relatively to do the looping and add muting to the sounds.

One of the cool things was that we also had a sound for thunder so I could create another Media Player object and then when the weather showed thunder I could play that in addition to the sound effects. There's something quite cool about crickets chirping and thunder cracking!

I must say that the pain of having a dial up connection was more than apparent at this time. Not only did I have to download 12 large wallpapers and 4 5MB sound files, but I also had to upload them when I sent the theme around for testing!

So, after this, we did a lot of testing, and I mean a lot, because needless to say, with some of the scripts being so complex there were bound to be a few things cropping up and combinations of events that alone I would never have found.

There is no end!

The blessing and the curse of a project like this is that it has no end.

As soon as the object was released, amongst the (largely) positive feedback there were a few suggestions, especially in the new newsgroup that was created. In addition to this, both myself and other team members had ideas as they used it more.

They basically involved making the object more customizable. Icebergs in Australia are not the most common sight, but then again chirping crickets aren't too common in my garden in Northern England. So, we added custom wallpaper, sounds and colorization of the user interface for comprehensiveness.

Sometimes the strangest things happen in development. One of the comments in the newsgroup was that that the hemisphere didn't change automatically with location. My immediate response was that this couldn't be done, but then while in the car in the way to my parents one evening I suddenly remember that weather.com provides longitude and latitude data. I felt like screaming out in excitement, but didn't think my wife would quite feel the same about my discovery. It also seemed a tad geekish so I restrained myself and scribbled a note on my desk when I got hope before I went to bed and forgot about it.

The next day was one of the best days I've had in the development of TND. Once I had set the hemisphere to auto select I was away on a mission. I'd had a vision of a map showing the current location. This wasn't as easy as expected. The concept was easy, ironically the hardest part was finding the right map. Now my education had tought me about different map projections but it's harder than you'd think to get an image of an equal area cylindical projection versus a azimuthal equidistant or Mercator projection. Hmm, I'm sounding geeky again aren't I!

Anyhow I found my map, and made a new panel on the controller dedicated to location. It was then just a matter of time and checking longitude and latitude on weather.com before I'd added a range of fully customizable default locations that could be switched too. Wow, what a day, what a rush, and if that's geeky then I'm happy to be a geek!

Where are we now?

Well, we'll made a range of other changes. You can now hide the window in the corner, you can now specify a directory rather than a single file from which the wallpapers are selected and a whole host of other things! I also wrote a concise user guide so people know how to use all these features.

Now we're into a phase of extensive testing as this really has become a major update of TND and it needs to be right. It's meant that it's going to be pushing it to release the update this week but it's definitely be worth it.

What's next for The Natural Desktop?

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