It’s late at night, and you’re avoiding work that was supposed to be done yesterday. You could open an application on your desktop to keep your attention, or what about the desktop itself? [Underpig1] has you covered with Octos. Octos is an open-source application created to allow interactive wallpapers based on HTML, CSS, or JS for Windows 10 and 11.
There are many wallpaper applications made to spruce up your desktop, but Octos stands out to us here at Hackaday from the nature of being open source. What comes along with the project is a detailed API to reference when creating your own wallpaper. Additionally, this allows for detailed and efficient visualization techniques that would otherwise be difficult to display, perfect for procrastination.
Included demos range from an interactive solar system to Conway’s Game of Life. Customization options allow for basic manipulation of the backdrops in the application itself, but we’re sure you could allow for some fun options with enough tinkering.
If you want to try Octos out for yourself, it’s incredibly easy. Octos can be found on the Microsoft Store, and additional backdrops can be added within the application. Open-source applications allow for incredibly easy additions to your personal device, but it’s not always that way. Kindle has been a prime example of a fairly locked down system; however, that never stops a clever hacker!
Thanks to [Joshua Throm] for the tip!
I think https://github.com/rocksdanister/lively is nicer, and also open-source
More options is always a good thing
They’re very different. For one, Octos is super lightweight (about 5 MB) whereas Lively is closer to 1 GB. Octos also works great on my laptop whereas Lively obliterated my CPU. Having tried both, Octos provides more built-in wallpapers and it’s so much easier to make your own. But they both serve different audiences and different purposes so it’s hard to compare.
Yeah, I’ve been using that for a long time now and love it!
I wanted this for so long
Active Desktop had been included since Windows 98. ;)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Desktop
Back then the usual suspects complained that Active Desktop was another Microsoft ploy to force IE4 onto the users, and then it was poo-pooed with all sorts of excuses and the whole concept of displaying web content on the desktop was derided as a gimmick.
But now that it’s open source, it’s new and efficient and exciting again.
Ha. I was going to mention this, but you beat me to it.
The true active desktop was discontinued after the release of 32-bit XP, though. Later versions of windows got Gadgets and live tiles, but nothing quite the same.
I remember playing around with the “preview release” (which ran on windows ’95) and deciding it was too resource intensive to be anything but a gimmick.
Still seems like a gimmick, but at least modern computers can probably render a large .gif on the desktop without choking and dying because it comes with a transparent background..
There is also “Wallpaper Engine”. I’ve played with it a few years ago. It could do cool things, but it also always kept my GPU and system from going into powersaving mode or low power idle mode. the fan was always on. power consumption of the whole was noticeably elevated. like keeping a game engine constantly running in the background, which is basically what it did. i wonder if these tools have the same downside.
From what I’ve read, Octos is built to be lightweight and work on laptops and smaller devices whereas other tools like Wallpaper Engine and Lively are more resource hogs, intended for powerful gaming computers. I played around with Octos a bit on my laptop while on battery and I can attest – it’s pretty performant and takes up very few resources in the background. No other wallpaper app I’ve tried works like that on my laptop. Of course some wallpapers like those using 3d effects and GPU take up more, but that’s to be expected.
Are we bringing back VirtuaGirl?
Sure, I think. In a modern, gen.-neutral version. It’ll be called VirtuaDude.
WirtualThey, because… inclusivity?
There was a time when windows could just load a webpage as a desktop wallpaper.
Does something like this exist for Linux these days? I used to love the dynamic wallpaper feature in G2. I had it set up to set a wallpaper based on the time of day, as it could be scripted through XML files, but I’ve always wanted something animated. I know it’s possible to set the ProjectM visualizer as a wallpaper through feh, but there’s a good bit of set up involved with that. I also know that someone made a wrapper script for Wallpaper Engine, but that seems kinda cumbersome, and it’s not a native solution.
This article makes me think about loosing of functionalities OS after OS.
I ve being using computers since DOS on 8086 and I think I m a “power user”, i like tweaking os to fit my usages.
We start to loosing lots of stuffs after windows XP, i can’t say if i prefer windows 98se or windows XP, but with vista and after numbers of little nice functionalities simply disappears, like active desktop or simply size of free disk space in the stat bar of an explorer window, of the possibility to create folders and custom bar inside taskbar.
Windows 10 is the loosing of windows … there is no more nice window border, by default this is flat, a mess to work with multiple windows, and there is plenty of empty space, for me i prefer windows 98/2000 windows border, there were clear, no loosing time to get the right information.
Recently inside windows 11 small taskbar gone …
Often we can see ” oh can now do that by installing this ” and old guys like me can say “in the past it was natively possible
To be honest, I really don’t get the complaint about window borders. macOS and Gnome Shell went borderless as well, because having a big, thick LINE around all of your applications is just wasted space. You can still resize windows by their edges, which is the only point of a window border. (Or if you can’t, then it’s a bug. Like, sometimes Qt 6 applications have RAZOR-thin border zones — but that’s Qt’s fault. You’re supposed to be able to drag window edges, they don’t have to be visible to be interactive.)
Do I think there should still be Appearance settings so that users can enable thicker window borders if they want them, for some reason? Yeah, ideally. Am I surprised that all three platforms have done away with the ability to control things like that? Not surprised, really. Just disappointed.
But honestly, even if the option were there I wouldn’t use it, and I’m not sure how many people would. What about borderless windows do you see as a problem?
Finally, a way to fully bring back Flying Toasters (and the rest of After Dark)???
https://www.bryanbraun.com/after-dark-css/all/flying-toasters.html
“based on HTML, CSS, or JS”? Pretty sure that should be “and”, not “or”. I’d love to see how a background could be implemented exclusively in CSS.