So normally I am fairly “meh” on the whole subject of desktop wallpapers, just because there are so many sites (interfacelift, wallbase, etc) that are all, lets be honest, pretty much the same. However, I saw Desktoppr I have to admit I got interested.
First of all, it’s the same idea, a collection of high quality wallpaper. Nothing super-cool so far. But here’s the twist… they link with your dropbox account. So here’s how it works. You sign up (hit up the @desktopprapp twitter account for the beta code) and link your Dropbox account to the site. While you’re browsing the site you click the little cloud icon and boom, wallpaper downloaded to your Dropbox folder. Excited yet? I thought so.
On your desktop computer then you just point your desktop at the folder and set it to auto-change every X minutes and now you desktop backgrounds synced from the cloud. Super cool x 3! The only downside is that Mac OS is the only OS that natively supports using a folder as a desktop wallpaper target. On windows you’ll need software to do this or this cool trick (though that’ll only work on the wallpapers you already have downloaded) and on Linux you’ll need a hack like this to make it work.
It’s one of those super-simple, “why did I not think of that” ideas (with a hint of “I can’t believe this hasn’t been done before”). Simple, and works well (though the system is in beta and the promise that they’re going to break everything).