‘National Geographic photo of the day’ downloader

March 24, 2013, with 0 comments
by admin

I really like the National Geographic photo of the day page. As I only have little time to care about my Windows profile’s styling, I wanted to set these photos as my desktop background.

There are dozens of applications on the market, allowing to download and manage these images along with images from multiple other sites. These applications compete with each other in offering more and more features. While this is of course nice in general, it makes the applications less robust and less silent during booting to automatically set the current photo of the day.

During waiting for a flight at the airport, I was just fed up with one of the applications I tended to use until that point. Wifi wasn’t yet available and the application just stalled before I could finally manually (!) update the photo of the day. So I sat down for about an hour and implemented a little application for exactly this purpose:

https://github.com/stephanstapel/WallpaperDownloader

This application is designed to be really minimalistic, currently offering no user interface, only downloading the current photo of the day and then exiting. The application is robust enough the tolerate unavailable LAN and Wifi connections with automatic periodic retries.

It will then download the current photo, store it into a ‘My pictures’ subfolder and setting it as the current wallpaper.

Have fun with the application, looking forward for your enhancements!

Stepahn

Aktualisiert am March 24, 2013