Tiling Wallpaper Project

[Rhetorica]

A few days ago I decided I was envious of these. It's patently unfair that CDE got all these nifty chunky low-color wallpaper images and NeXT didn't. Surely, the multimedia machine of all time should have some nice pixels on it. So, some tinkering later, and I have the first batch to show off. Behold!

Attached: a ZIP containing all the images I've made so far. Subsequent posts: gallery of blingery.

For most of these I only bothered making a #557 ("NeXT blue") version, to recall the default NeXT desktop color, but feel free to request or concoct other hues.

MIT-licensed.

[Rhetorica]

The cube series: based on binarized images of a NeXTcube motherboard.

[Rhetorica]

Some embossed perlin noise, ideal for making a simple rock surface. Photoshop is too "advanced" to produce the emboss effect required—its Bas Relief filter adds an annoying gradient—so I actually had to whip out TIFFany II for these ones.

[Rhetorica]

NeXT soup! Inspired by the kinetic typography on Paul Rand's logo pamphlet, and also the tradition of Memphis "confetti" textures.

[Rhetorica]

Mazes. The actual thing that got me inspired to do this was a half-baked vibe-coded pseudo-CDE desktop-in-a-browser thing that made the rounds on r/osdev. It had a funky maze wallpaper. This is not exactly it, but it's not too far off...

[Rhetorica]

Tiling hieroglyphs! Since this is possibly the CDE wallpaper, it was imperative we get a nicer one. Available in Ohlfs Silver #2 and Cobalt Poisoning. (The stone texture comes from Uru, the short-lived online Myst game.)

[Rhetorica]

Lastly (for the first batch), vertical gradients. They don't look very good in thumbnails, but they add a nice unobtrusive verve to the background.

_{It appears I have no idea how to play pool.}

[jeffburg]

I think I am still a n00b, but how do you get the next workspace to have a background image?

[marvin]

@jeffburg for background image you can use

Fiend .app can display a background image via Preferences, Image File, it has also a "Tile Image" option.

ToyViewer .app has a Wallpaper menu with many options.

FastView .app has a Background menu with some options.

To make the background appear after boot, the app can be auto-started from Dock.

[Rhetorica]

Getting ToyViewer to remember wallpaper settings seemed like a futile effort—though it turns out it expects a script file to be written for the purpose:



So, for example, I set up my ~/Library/ToyViewer/rc.wallpaper like this:

Code Select Expand

~/Pictures/Walltextures/hiero-12.gif t
~/Pictures/Walltextures/hiero-blue.gif t
~/Pictures/Walltextures/maze-12r.gif t
~/Pictures/Walltextures/gradually-12.gif t
~/Pictures/Walltextures/cube-blue.gif t
~/Pictures/Walltextures/rock-blue-12.gif t
...which randomly selects one of the bluer papers from the images posted so far.

There are also two programs named 'background' on PEAK in apps/utils/workspace/: Background.3.2 (at the top) and the m68k-only background.1.0. From the readme I think the former is a lightweight, single-purpose csh script that would probably be ideal for a more pristine setup.

(Also: previously I used a full 24-bit 1920x1080 TIFF via Fiend as my wallpaper. It was sloooow.)