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.