In 1997, Internet Explorer 4.0 introduced a feature called Active Desktop which essentially allowed you to turn the Windows desktop into a web page. You could display a page from the Internet or construct a local HTML page to serve as your desktop.

I had been looking for a mechanism to display family photos on the desktop. I didn’t want to display just one as a desktop background: I wanted to rotate a number of them, and I wanted to build it myself, rather than buying something off the shelf. It looked like the Active Desktop might do the trick. I figured the JavaScript to load and rotate images couldn’t be too complicated.

DG stands for Desktop Gallery, which is how I would normally refer to this project, but when I spelled out Desktop Gallery 2 on the blue column to the right, the 2 wrapped to the next line, which looked crappy. For the sake of this blurb, it’s DG2.

The project was pure HTML and JavaScript. A slider on the “control panel” in the bottom-left corner of the screen controlled the frequency with which images would randomly change. The images were pulled from a predefined directory. Clicking on the top of the control panel would cause a drawer to slide out from which you could select any of eight different frames for the images. The frames that look somewhat photorealistic originated as real frames that were flat enough to lend themselves to being scanned. Bits and pieces of the scans were then composited in Photoshop. The rest of the frames were created in Photoshop from scratch.

DG2 implies that there was a DG1, and to be honest, I can't remember what I added to warrant the version bump. Probably the control panel.

Ahead of the Curve?