Ah yes, where to begin? At the beginning I suppose.
One day I was sitting at my desk looking at my computer's wallpaper when I decided it would be cool to have it randomly change to some of the pictures on my hard drive. I went to Google to have a look for what was out there and to my surprise there was nothing that I liked the look of. Nothing simple, well designed, and did I say simple? Even looking today, the only wallpaper changing software I can find looks like it was written by a student or a hobbyist - it's amateurish, poorly thought through, designed with no thoughts about usability and most amazingly of all these people charge money for their software!
As a pro software developer and particularly a supposed GUI expert I knew I could do much better. So I wrote version 1 where you could add a list of pictures and they'd be changed in sequence at specified intervals. I was happy, random backgrounds on my computer.
But then I realised that if I liked it, maybe you would too. So I put it up on my website for free download. And after a while people started using it. And then making suggestions for improvements. I'd written it as Me-Ware (i.e. for me) but with other people starting to use it I had to put some more work in. I implemented most of what was suggested, added a crash handler to report any crashes back to my computer (which has proven very useful) and I had to be professional about releasing new versions so I didn't piss people off.
And then came version 2. I decided to implement Flickr functionality (a stroke of genius suggested to me by my friend Ian) and while I was at it I added the long-asked-for feature of monitoring a folder for pictures. Since it was a major new version I implemented a boat load of features, fixed all the bugs I had on the list, rewrote the installer and did a whole bunch of other things to make it more stable, usable and reliable.
Version 3 brought Yahoo! image search and Phanfare integration along with more great functionality, largely suggested by the people who use it - you! Later versions included support for smugmug, Picasa and Facebook with version 3.6 bringing in generic support for RSS Feeds thereby supporting a host of other sites like DeviantArt, Photobucket and any Tumblr blog!
As I put more functionality in I kept reminding myself of why I wrote the thing in the first place:
It must be as simple as possible. It's only switching backgrounds, which isn't complicated.
And so along came JBS version 4 and a massive rewrite. I'd let it grow organically and realised before I released version 3 that sooner or later I'd need a rethink to bring JBS back to its simpler roots but without losing functionality. Eventually I managed to get enough free time to do the work and take a holistic look at how you interact with JBS, what you're trying to achieve and I came up with the 'Unified User Interface'. Everything is in one place, things are where you'd expect them to be and the out-of-the box experience no longer leaves new users bewildered. I also took the opportunity to add a host of new features like transition effects, cork board snapshot scrapbooks, support for Google and Bing image search, Webshots and loads more.
Believe me when I say that I put a huge amount of thought into every new feature to keep it as the sort of software I would download. I use it myself all the time. Oh, and best of all? It's still free! Loads of people think I'm mad for not selling it but frankly, it's more fun giving it away than trying to make money out of it!
So if you've got anything you'd like to see in John's Background Switcher then let me know!
John Conners.