Desktop Wallpaper Made Easy

My first thoughts for FrameIT Freedom came when I bought a new computer that had Vista as the operating system. For a long time I'd used WWPlus32 that'd I'd bought to use on Windows 95/98 and had been using ever since. But with the move to Vista it didn't work any longer.

I tried out several trial desktop wallpaper solutions, and of course Vista comes with one. Everything I was seeing was small windows with a few check boxes for presentation. What I needed was an environment that was easy to manipulate the image I was viewing.

I'm a computer programmer and was now using C# for a client. I decided to have a go at creating a desktop wallpaper solution for Windows Vista. Using C# for .NET 3.5 as the base it wasn't too long before I had a rudimentary desktop wallpaper program up and running.

I had the basics, Tile, Center, Stretch, Resize (to fit the screen) and Seamless Mirroring. What was needed was a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor. It's not as easy as you might imagine to populate a list of images and give them their sub-titles that is the file name. But once that was done, I already had buttons that were nondescript for resize and reset. What I needed to do was transform them into true WYSIWYG photos.

So now these photo images give a look-ahead view of what the image will look like were you to click on them. This method went towards the seamless mirroring images on the top right of the editor as well. Now looking at any image gave the WYSIWYG that I was going for. From there though was to add the true magic of the ideas I'd been churning over.

These were lines, borders, frames that could be moved individually (Patent Pending) to manipulate the image from. Unlike traditional drag a box to grab a section of an image, using these methods you can move the right side of the box over one pixel, you would have to redraw the whole box. Now just move that border/frame and all the other frame's of the crop (if there is any) stay where you positioned them previously.

Using this tool an image can be cut in half with the single frame border line. No longer do you have to try and get say the upper left corner and drag to encapsulate the part of the image you want, which is half and have all the way to the edges. You get this automatically with FrameIT Freedom.

Later following community feedback was the ability to Print, Rotate and Flip the image. All following the standard that had been set to this point, keep the original image intact.

Years ago I found, using another image editing program, that images degrade when manipulated and you could lose parts of the image over time, unaware of this until you tried to undo the changes. FrameIT Freedom keeps the original unchanged. All manipulations do nothing to the original, but every setting is remembered. Just as in photo-copying, the original is best to copy from than those gather defects as copy after copy is made. So FrameIT Freedom does the same drawing from the Original for every view.

This is really handy for photo images taken with a camera because often those images are taken when the camera is held vertically and the resulting image needs to be rotated for best viewing. So using FrameIT Freedom, the image viewed is rotated for viewing but the original remains unaffected thus keeping its integrity.

I think you'll find that FrameIT Freedom is revolutionary for a desktop wallpaper solution. I enjoy using it every time I want to manipulate a photo and position it to the desktop. I foresee that this could be used for other professions that need to project images using projectors, to rotate and or crop them to position their focus for everyone to view for best effect.