Considering daytime

[sojusnik]

I have 100+ different wallpapers of nature showing a different time of the day, that could be roughly grouped in morning, daytime, evening and night. These wallpapers could be then put in one of the four folders, that will represent the according daytime. Your extension then could have an option to only show wallpapers from one of these folders, according to the present daytime, so that one will only see wallpapers depicting midday from, i.d. 11:00 - 17:00, and so on. It's crucial, that the time periods for the 4 folders should be manually adjustable. A more sophisticated approach would be to consider the sun position automatically, like it's done in Redshift, and then just split the whole day in 4 parts to resemble the 4 daytimes mentioned above. I wouldn't split the day into 4 equal parts, but make the morning and evening each only 4 hours long, and the day and night each 8 hours long.

[tekstrong]

I would love to see this implemented if possible as well... a solely time-based system would be great, but an automated one based on sunrise-sunset + time combination would be even better.

Thanks for a great extension!

[BigE]

Now with gnome 3.24 we have night time mode. This is exposed through D-Bus in the settings daemon by org.gnome.SettingsDaemon.Color There are two properties that we can use called Sunrise and Sunset to detect when to change the profile in sunrise/sunset mode at least. It isn't a full solution, but its a decent start to get basic support in the extension, and adds the functionality requested by @tekstrong I will also have to find a solution to splitting the day up by time and managing things that way. The biggest problem is setting up different profiles at different times. At least adding sunrise/sunset will tackle this problem for future development into this enhancement.

[sojusnik]

Can't wait to test the new version!

[adrinux]

@sojusnik Wouldn't this feature be better dealt with using Gnome's built in xml wallpaper slideshow feature? Hard to write xml so this would probably help https://github.com/maoschanz/dynamic-wallpaper-editor.

You'd lose the random factor of course. So a simpler daytime = light colours vs night = dark colours would still be nice.

[sojusnik]

@adrinux I'm aware of this option, but the approach suggested by @BigE in his last post is clearly superior, as randomness is key here.

[thazhemadam]

With profiles being defined, we could create 4 new profiles - each having images in each of the 4 folders (or how many ever folders).
Now, for a given profile, Rotation mode gives us the option of changing the desktop backgrounds every x time intervals.
Is there any way we can perform a check before the desktop background is changed (preferably a calculated one using a counter mechanism or something of the sort), to check if it is time to switch the profile as well?

It might also help to try and introduce this mechanism by providing a wrapper for profiles, that specifies the order in which they must be cycled through and from what time to what time each profile must be activated every day.
(This wrapper for profiles essentially acts as a layer that helps encapsulate profiles, the way profiles act as a layer that helps encapsulate directories containing images)

[BigE]

There is already an Hourly timer that could easily be extended to create this functionality https://github.com/BigE/desk-changer/blob/version-30/[email protected]/daemon/timer.js#L49 All that would have to be done is to add an additional check for the hour to be one of the four... and this could easily be another rotation mode. I wouldn't have a problem doing that, because a sunrise/sunset could still use DBUS and be separate from this timer. The only real issue comes to choosing a profile for any of those times... I'm not quite sure how to implement that yet, but I'm guessing it'd be a new setting field to store the profile for each of the four intervals.

The extension has just been in a very poor state since I rewrote the dameon in JS and I've had to commit most of my time to fixing that. I haven't had time to commit to the extras yet, but I'm getting there! I'd also be happy to take a look at any ideas anyone has on how to get this done.