MultiScape Spans A Single Image Across Multiple Desktops With Ease
Mac OS X only: We love dressing up our desktops with multi-monitor wallpapers, but if you’re a Mac user, getting one image to span multiple desktops is a pain. Free application MultiScape makes it easy.
Lifehacker reader and MultiScape developer David Zwerdling writes:
MultiScape is a Mac application that scales, crops, saves and applies a single image to multiple desktops—a simple thing that can take lots of time by hand. What’s best about MultiScape is that it’s really simple. All you have to do is supply it with an image. It retrieves the desktop layout information from the Mac OS and goes from there. The process takes seconds.
Windows users have been able to use previously mentioned DisplayFusion to tackle this task (and more) for quite some time, but if you’ve ever run into this wall trying to set a good panoramic pic to your OS X desktop, MultiScape is potentially a godsend. The app still needs a good multi-monitor wallpaper to start from, and I noticed a bug or two (not all wallpapers turned out how I would have expected), but it’s worth a go for easing your multi-monitor wallpaper woes (and hopefully it’ll only get better).
MultiScape [Google Code]
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Comments (AU Comments | US Comments)
Just switched the orientation of my monitors - with the big monitor on the left, the images are proportioned correctly, but very large (but I was using a very large image). So it looks like you can play around with Display Preferences to tweak it.
With the 1680x1050 monitor on the left, it interprets my setup as one 2960x1666 monitor. With the 1280x800 monitor on the left, it interprets my setup as one 1867x1051 monitor.
mhick
@srudes2: sweet, thanks. I'm wondering, will this span it across multiple workspaces? And will it work on a Radeon card (looking at the "nvidia-settings" part)
aaziz
@Eruanno: Just tried on my setup (1280x800 Macbook + 1680x1050 external). The images looked OK on the Macbook, but were stretched out on the external. It treats both monitors as a single huge monitor, and the different resolutions seem to be confusing it. Right now, I don't see a way to set preferences for different sized monitors.
mhick
@aaziz:
1. Set up your ubuntu to use TwinView(sudo nvidia-settings)
2. Right-click on desktop and press "Change Desktop Background"
3. Choose your dual screen wallpaper and set the style to "Centered"
How does this handle different screen sizes? (For example laptop + external screen)
What options are there for Linux? (GNOME)
aaziz
Google Code is not a free hosting site for closed projects. The author claims a GPL3 license, but only binaries are available; the svn repo is empty. This isn't what Google Code is for.
CatherineStructus
This app seems to suck. I tried to use it to set my screen (MBP + external) and it set only the MBP screen to a tiny portion of the image. There are no options, the help and about are both labeled 'New Application'...
Problems.
OS X lets you set wallpaper per screen.
How hard could it possibly be to slice your panoramic wallpapers into a set of monitor-sized ones? I'd say that's an even better solution if you're running monitors with different resolutions.
@CatherineStructus: Ah, who cares?