Ohad Eder-Pressman’s blog

Ever find yourself glancing at your desktop looking for a shortcut for more than a few seconds ?

People will sometimes choose beautiful pictures that aren’t fit to be a wallpaper. The heart of the problem tends to be the lack of contrast between your icon/s and the wallpaper it’s sitting on. That’s why an Icon can lurk in some dark/bright corner of the screen and almost get swallowed by the beautiful wallpaper you chose to put there.

For once I had enough with that I decided to write a small program that will find your icons and make sure they don’t blend in with your desktop, all this in an elegant way ofcourse as I’m a design/elegance freak.

I know I could have taken the icon-positions from the desktops Image-List, but that’s just too easy I wanted to try out some image-processing, so here’s what I did :

• Take a clear screen-shot of the desktop.
• Calc the |difference| between this and the user’s wallpaper. (so logically the icons should stand out).
• Remove all the noise, as in take only the big differences.
• Run a Maximum-Filter, this will expand that area consumed by the icons.
• Divide into a grid, then try to Flood-Fill each point in the grid to find the areas from the previous step, then bound these areas with nice rectangles.
• Give these rectangles round-corners, a border, and make them semi-transparent.
• Blend back with the Original Wallpaper, and there we go.

I used the Corona Library for loading/saving images.

And I decided to start using the GPL for source-code I release, so here we go.

Note: The program currently works with ‘Stretched Wallpapers‘ only, changes will be pleasantly accepted.

Download: Source, Binary.

(that’s a person lying next to the poster)

I went on and generated, then printed a 2.25 x 1.5 meter (7.3 x 4.9 feet) Mandelbrot-Set poster. It’s higher than Michael Jordan and almost as wide as the average sedan. It has presence because of the shear amount of data it embodies. It’s made up of 25 digital printouts, each printout is 45×30 cm and has a resolution of 400dpi.

When you walk by large posters you will usualy notice they are made out of very large pixels, sometimes you’ll even be able to notice the RGB components seperately (ala fake mode). This is because we usualy don’t have enough data to fill such large posters with.

The thing with fractals, is that they are infinitely large, and thus can fill up as much space as we have to spare. This one has 850 Mega-Pixel of data.

This program lets you generate Mandelbrot-Sets of any size and precision, and automatically slice them for easy/cheap printing.

Download: Source, Binary.