Flash/flex as your wallpaper, Could make MyDreamApp winner quickly
Is was looking through the winners of the My Dream App competiton for Mac users and noticed the winners application. Basically its a themed wallpaper for OSX (basically!!) that changes and animates depending on the weather. By winning the competition he has been paired with a pretty talented developer to make his dream app a reality. Cool. Macs display layer will do a nice job of this. But then I got thinking, man this would be soo easy in flash/flex. With a little work with a particle emitter to emit raindrop pngs or something you could achieve this. I seached on google and found a few apps that can place Swfs on the wallpaper. Funny I had never thought of this before.
I tested it with the 3d Carosel tutorial from http://www.gotoandlearn.com/.
I tried a few and the best one (especially with cpu usage) seems to be Animated Wallpaper which also supports DirectX 3d scenes (though cpu goes through the roof).
So really on windows with flash Atmosphere the winner could be a reality very quickly. If only Adobe would revisit the ExternalInterface and make a few improvements, flash could become a common Gui for applications. At the moment it is alot of work to setup a good framework for more complex applications. Lucky mac users are starting to get all the cool apps. 
wish I could afford a new one.
Anyway just found this one interesting and thought I should Share.
Man I have to pay more attention to my spelling….it seems to be getting worse.
I tried it manually where Windows lets you set a web page as your desktop wallpaper. It worked great but my cpu was frying on it. I need to be able to actually open a program and work as normal while these things run in the background.
By the way, Glow by MDM currently creates these for Windows and will hook it up to system level functions such as file system, db access. Havent tried it though.
the sample your using is a tutorial from http://www.gotoandlearn.com/ i think. -ethan
It’s Lee Brimlow’s
TheFlashblog.com
or gotoandlearn.com
Cool Updated, cheers Guys, and cheers Lee! it purdy!
I was thinking along a similar line a few weeks ago, for embeding a flash/flex business dashboard on a users desktop. I had a bit of a play with loading the flash files onto the desktop using Active Desktop. Worked ok, but was a bit nasty…
Would be interesting to see if you can load flash into Vista’s desktop gadgets… They supposedly support loading components from Windows Live.
Ekkk Seriously kiddies keep away from active desktop. Eww ewww ewwww!! Bevan have you tried MDM Glow and Animated Wallpaper. They both seem alot better. Might be the wrong way to use an application though….. Widgets might be a better approach as you say. Vista??? why not support all platforms and use Apollo lol.
Yeah Apollo will be good when it arrives…
Not sure if Apollo will run on the desktop level though.