Wallpaper

The Tyrant King Home Screen [Featured Home Screen]

Submitted by admin on Tue, 09/27/2011 - 19:00
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Reader Worlder Mon created this clean, monochrome home screen using a few simple text widgets and a unique icon set.

Set an image as your desktop wallpaper in Google Chrome

Submitted by admin on Tue, 10/12/2010 - 07:30

Chrome's inability to set an image as desktop wallpaper is a shortcoming I've harped on before. It's a feature that just about every non-power user I know who tries Chrome wishes was there -- but even at version 8 Chrome still can't do some things that Internet Explorer 6 could. A little while back, the Chrome Pig extension arrived -- finally bringing a third-party solution.

Still, it's a bit more than I wanted. Give me a simple right-click, set-as-wallpaper option. And that's precisely what Mohamed Mansour has done. Witness: the Set image as wallpaper extension for Google Chrome! Right click, set image as wallpaper, and an HTML5 previewer appears so you can eyeball the finished product -- you can even choose to stretch, center, or tile your image. Future versions will include an options page that allows you to skip the previewer and simply perform a two-click image swap.

Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on which OS you use) Mohamed's extension currently only works with Windows. Linux and Mac versions are being worked on.

By the way, there's absolutely no need to panic over MG Siegler's comments on TechCrunch that "someone fed the bloat trolls." Set as wallpaper only uses about 5MB memory -- the same as most other basic extensions. Clearly MG thinks that saving an image, locating it on disk, and then using OS X's built-in controls to set the wallpaper is a much more elegant way to do things.

As for me, I'll take my context menu enhancement, thanks.

Chrome Pig extension checks Gmail, takes screenshots -- and lets you set clipboard images as wallpaper!

Submitted by admin on Wed, 08/25/2010 - 11:00

 

In general, I prefer Chrome extensions which don't try to do too much. Do one thing, and do it well is a good general rule, after all. However, once in a while a Swiss-knife extension crops up which is filled to overflowing with useful features and just begs to be installed.

Enter Chrome Pig. Yes, it's weirdly named. Yes, it includes a somewhat random mish-mosh of features, but dang, are they handy ones. Chrome Pig can:

  • Screenshot an entire page, the viewable portion, or a selected region
  • Check Gmail for unread messages (you must be signed in)
  • Open supported files types in the Google Docs previewer
  • Edit a page's CSS to your liking
  • Re-enable right click on sites which disable it
  • Search the site you're currently browsing
  • Open the current page in IE
  • Set a clipboard image to your desktop wallpaper

I've put the last one in bold because it's a feature which you would think should be included by default in a Web browser. Firefox, Opera, and IE can all do this, but Chrome can't? Why? At any rate, problem solved! With Chrome Pig installed, just right click and copy an image, click its browser action button, and set the clipboard image to your wallpaper -- it will even resize, center, or tile.


Some of Chrome Pig's features -- lyric search, form fill, and translate, for example -- I can do without. The configuration page offers checkboxes to disable unwanted items, though they still appeared in the drop-down after multiple disable/enable attempt and a browser restart. Hopefully the developer will address this issue in a coming update.

That shortcoming aside, I'm happily adding Chrome Pig to my extensions -- it'll replace two other and add a couple additional features which will come in handy.