Interactive, animated web wallpapers with new open-source app Octos

Users can make and share animated, interactive web-based wallpapers on Windows 10 & 11. The app is open-source and comes with loads of built-in community-made wallpapers, from an old-school hacker terminal to a fully functional physics sandbox. Users can put music visualizations on their wallpaper, customize it with widgets and clocks, and even explore the entire solar system in real time on their desktop. It's available for download on the Microsoft Store and on GitHub. Any thoughts/feedback on the project?

Visit the Octos homepage for download links and more information.

Some examples are shown below (from the store page).

lol

underpig said:

Users can put music visualizations on their wallpaper, customize it with widgets and clocks, and even explore the entire solar system in real time on their desktop.

Click to expand...

Interesting.
Is it a resource hog?

The Fluid Wallpaper is interesting. When loaded it was great to see that multiple monitors were supported and configurable:



When the Fluid Wallpaper was started, all 6 of my monitors had the wallpaper visible:





After a short period, the wallpaper vanished from 5 monitors but as you can see below, the wallpaper on the monitors is still interactive.





At one point the desktop wallpaper stopped and was only visible in my Stardock Fences6 blocks. This is a problem, for me.

antspants said:

Interesting.
Is it a resource hog?

Click to expand...

It depends. There are some features and customizable settings to help with this, like freeing up resources when wallpapers are hidden behind fullscreen apps. Of course, some wallpapers take up a lot more resources because they use 3D effects or have complex visual effects, whereas others are so simple that they take up virtually no resources on their own. I've only really tested it on my laptop and I'd say it doesn't use more than 5% CPU on average (no more than any other background apps), unless I am actively interacting with one of the more demanding 3D wallpapers. That is just in my experience, though.

antspants said:

The Fluid Wallpaper is interesting. When loaded it was great to see that multiple monitors were supported and configurable:

View attachment 143168

When the Fluid Wallpaper was started, all 6 of my monitors had the wallpaper visible:

After a short period, the wallpaper vanished from 5 monitors but as you can see below, the wallpaper on the monitors is still interactive.

At one point the desktop wallpaper stopped and was only visible in my Stardock Fences6 blocks. This is a problem, for me.

View attachment 143167

Click to expand...

Interesting. I haven't tried it with more than 2 displays, but it is cool to see it in action on 5. I'm guessing there's some interference between the Stardocks software and Octos, I wonder what's up with that...

underpig said:

but it is cool to see it in action on 5

Click to expand...

6

Yeah I was impressed with that. Fences often conflicts, I think multiple monitors are Stardocks biggest stuff around when issues are reported. They eventually get it right but at what cost, I do not know.