Variety Wallpaper Changer Sees New Release

Variety, a cool wallpaper changer that works with most desktop environments (KDE, LXDE, Xfce, Unity, GNOME Shell, Cinnamon or Pantheon), has reached version 0.4.12.

Changes in Variety 0.4.12:

• quotes support - Variety can fetch quotes from QuotesDaddy and display them on top of the desktop. The quotes are highly customizable: you can change the text color, backdrop color, font, transparency, shadow, placement, and you can also filter quotes by tags or authors or set the interval between quotes
• customizable appindicator icon: you can now select between dark and light appindicator icons but not only that. In the latest Variety, you can also use the current wallpaper to be used as an indicator icon (so the icon changes with the wallpaper). The icon can also be hidden in which case you can control Variety via keyboard shortcuts or using the Unity quicklists
• the option to display a digital clock on top of the wallpaper has been enhanced: both the clock and the date font can be customized (the typeface as well as the font size)
• Preferences take effect immediately
• Support for XMP/EXIF image ratings

For those not familiar with Variety, here's a quick feature list:

• should work under KDE, LXDE, Xfce, Unity, GNOME Shell, Cinnamon or Pantheon (elementary OS)
• can automatically download wallpaper from Flickr, Wallbase.cc, Wallpapers.net as well as NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day.
• Ubuntu appindicator support; you can scroll over the indicator icon to change the wallpaper
• can apply fancy filters to the images: grayscale, heavy blur, oil painting, charcoal painting, pointilism, pixellate
• option to display the time on the desktop, using a nice digital clock
• clipboard support: can monitor the clipboard for image URLs and fetch them
• more

Below you can see the latest Variety 0.4.12 in action:


Direct video link

Install Variety wallpaper changer

Variety is available in the Ubuntu Software Center (for Ubuntu 12.04 / 12.10), but the version is quite old so to install the latest version, you can use its official Ubuntu PPA:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:peterlevi/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install variety

Arch Linux users can get Variety wallpaper changer via AUR.

For other Linux distributions, the Variety source code can be downloaded via Launchpad.