Friday, June 5, 2009

Wallpaper-tray vs. Drapes

Short version: Wallpaper-tray wins.

I was looking for a wallpaper-rotator for my desktop. Man, how spoiled we are! Anyway, looking through Add/Remove Programs in Ubuntu, I found that I had a mystery-meat choice: Wallpaper-tray or Drapes. So I installed both, tasted the mystery meats, and here's what I found.

Wallpaper-tray (hereafter WT) shows a thumbnail of the current wallpaper on your panel. I really like this touch. Drapes does not seem to do this.

WT lets you do an instant search if you know you have a wallpaper image with a certain word in the title; Drapes has no search.

WT expects you to know what wallpapers you want ahead of time, and you put them in a folder. Drapes sort of does this odd abuse-of-checkboxes thing where you're "able" to pick which ones you really want or don't want to show through the Drapes interface. It didn't really work for me.

WT seems to have more options overall, though. It's sort of like more options + sane defauts. In WT, a single click on the icon changes the wallpaper. In Drapes, you double-click.

Overall, Wallpaper-tray seems a better fit to me. More polished. Looks cooler in the panel, too. Drapes will work in a pinch, but man, those checkboxes bug me.

1 comment:

  1. I tried Drapes a while back and was not impressed - the "Auto-Refresh" option only kinda worked and usually only after a reboot. Lame. I'll give this other option a try.

    ReplyDelete

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