Written by melat0nin the 3 Jun 08 at 19:14.
Related project: Gnome.
Status: New
Rationale
I'd love to see a stylish wallpaper switcher, which fades wallpapers at predefined intervals a la OS X.
There are lots of lovely wallpapers on sites such as www.interfacelift.com, and having them switch automagically with a beautiful fade transition would really complement Ubuntu and the often gorgeous-looking themes that people customise their desktops with.
I am not aware of any reason this feature could/should not be implemented in Gnome. This is on the assumption that it isn't already there - haven't checked. :-\
You can create an XML script to do this, and Synaptic has available wallpaper-tray, which I admittedly haven't used. However, I wouldn't object if a similar functionality made its way to the Appearance Preferences.
I've used wallpaper-tray, but it was buggy and it doesn't do transitions.
Plus I think it would be more upt-do-date to have such functionality built into the Gnome wallpaper applet rather than having to resort to third party software to get it done. It would add to the 'completeness' of Ubuntu.
How long till Ubuntu will add this feature in!!!!! Apple has had this feature for some time. If Apple can do it, shouldn't Ubuntu be able to do so as well!!!!!
As of Jaunty the fade on change works out of the box! (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1060490) So now any wallpaper changer (some are mentioned there including PPAs) should work in this way.