Anthony Naddeo
Computer Science undergraduate student at the University of Maine

Do it all from the Settings Menu

Create your own Scenic packages

Scenic allows you to automatically change your N9 wallpaper based on a wallpaper.conf file or randomly from images in a folder. This section will explain how to make your own wallpaper folders that anyone can download. These files are not necessary if you only want to use Scenic in Random mode.

Format

The scenic format is simple. Just have a folder (name doesn't matter) that contains all of the images you intend on using, along with a file named 'wallpaper.conf'. The recommended image format is jpg for quick loading, but it probably won't make a big difference. They should be 480x854 px.

Let's say you have three jpg images named one.jpg, two.jpg and three.jpg. Let's say you want one.jpg to be shown from 12:00am to 6:00am, two.jpg to be shown from 6:00am to 6:00pm, and three.jpg to be shown for the rest of the day. This is how your wallpaper.conf file will look:

00=one.jpg
06=two.jpg
18=three.jpg

Scenic also supports intervals of random images. So if you wanted to change the above wallpaper.conf file to use a random image from 3:00 am to 6:00 am, you would have to add this

00=one.jpg
03=random
06=two.jpg
18=three.jpg

Thats the entire file! Note that it uses military (24 hour) time, and there are no spaces. Scenic uses the interval you specify to check and update the wallpaper. Obviously, you can have up to 24 images, one for every hour of the day.

The end result is a folder that contains images and a wallpaper.conf file

Usage

After you have downloaded the folder onto your phone, you need to tell Scenic where to find it. On the settings screen, enter the path to the folder into the 'Folder' field. If you used the browser to download the folder, then the path may look like

/home/user/MyDocs/Downloads/folder

Notice the path ends at the folder, NOT the wallpaper.conf file. The next time Scenic updates the wallpaper it will use your new images. Scenic keeps this information in /home/user/.config/scenic/scenic.conf.

Performance

Some people worry about battery life when using background services. Even when running at a one minute interval, Scenic will have no noticable effect on performance or battery life. If you want to see the Scenic doing it's job for yourself, then from a command line you can execute

$ scenicd update

And you should see output similar to

opening scenic.conf file
opened 
reading wallpaper
reading interval
reading enabled

Found the following:
mode: Hourly
enabled: true
wallpaper dir: /opt/scenic/wallpaper
interval: 600
updating wallpaper

gconftool-2 --type=string -s /desktop/meego/background/portrait/picture_filename 
/opt/scenic/wallpaper/night.jpg
sleeping for 0 seconds
		  

The point in doing this is you get to observe how quickly the program runs. The update takes a fraction of a second, and the rest of the time Scenic is sleeping using no cpu