Digital Home Thoughts: Windows 7: New Desktop Slideshow Support

"Curious as to what else was under Microsoft's elaborate lock, key, and duct-tape protection scheme mentioned earlier, I had my friend Chris Holmes run a scan of his 7 system, as I'm still babying my laptop's SSD drive. What we found were ties into system files littered across the entire operating system. Post-analysis revealed another feature tucked away in the corner - Say hello to (what I think should be called) Desktop Slideshow. If your memory is sharp, you'll remember Long Zheng found mention of this very feature on MSDN first, of which was quickly sanitized by Sinofsky's secret police."

As someone who enjoys vibrant and colourful desktop backgrounds, and who changes them on a regular basis, I'm excited about this feature - essentially it allows you to select multiple deskop backgrounds and have them rotate on a timed basis. More importantly, it's not just limited to backgrounds on your computer - you can subscribe to RSS feeds and use these feeds as photos sources. With most photo sites providing feeds, it wouldn't be hard to imagine a scenario where you could have a constant stream of images flowing to your desktop from a variety of sources - especially if you got creative with merged feeds with Feedburner. Want grandma and grandpa to have desktop backgrounds of your family photos? Looks like it will be easy with Windows 7!