The Texture Randomizer allows you to cause a randomly chosen Desktop Texture to be installed on your desktop at any time. (The texture will only be installed in memory -- no changes are made to your System file.) This is particularly useful if you would like a different texture on your desktop each time you start your Macintosh. Simply drop the Texture Randomizer or an alias to it into the Startup Items folder in your System folder.
The Texture Randomizer works only under System 7.0 or greater. Apart from that restriction, it will run on any system on which the other Desktop Textures programs will run.
HOW TO USE IT
The first time you try to run the Texture Randomizer, it will display a configuration dialog (after displaying a message about choosing texture files). The left half of this dialog contains an empty list of files and two buttons which allow you to add and remove files from the list. To use the Randomizer, you must choose one or more texture files. Press the "Add..." button, and a Standard File dialog will appear asking you to select a file. If you select a file, it will be added to the list. You can remove one or more files by clicking on the names of the files you wish to remove and then pressing the "Remove" button. You may add any number of texture files.
The right half of the configuration dialog contains a list which displays all of the textures in any one of the files. If you do not press any of the buttons below this list, all of the textures in the file are candidates for random selection. You can cause any of the textures not to be chosen for random desktop display by selecting them and pressing the "Ignore" button under the texture list. Its name will be dimmed (drawn in grey). (No modifications are made to the texture file.) You can place a texture back in contention by pressing the "Select" button. You can also select or ignore all of the textures in a file by pressing the "Ignore All" or "Select All" buttons. You can invert the selected/ignored state of a texture or group of textures by selecting one or more textures and double-clicking on the selection.
A separate list is kept of which textures are selected for each of the files you choose. When you are finished choosing files and textures, press "OK."
THE FINDER INTERFACE
Once you have chosen one or more files, opening the Texture Randomizer application will cause a randomly-chosen texture to be placed on the desktop. The configuration dialog will not appear.
If you wish to make changes to your configuration, hold down the Option key or Command key while opening the Texture Randomizer application. The configuration dialog will appear.
If you wish to add a file to the file list more quickly, you can just drag any file containing resources onto the Texture Randomizer icon. The configuration dialog will appear only if you hold down the Option key or Command key.
DIAGNOSTIC MESSAGES
The Texture Randomizer will display a message if any of the following conditions occur:
- You have not yet selected any texture files.
- One of the files you have selected contains no textures.
- You have removed from the random selection process all the textures in any given file.
THE RANDOM SELECTION PROCESS
The Texture Randomizer first picks one of the texture files you have selected, the probability of choosing any given texture file weighted by the number of textures in the file. Then, it chooses a random texture within that file and checks to see if it has been deselected. If it has, another is chosen, etc. until a selected texture is chosen. This texture is then displayed.
This method allows for changes to be made to a texture file since the last time the configuration dialog was used without ill effects. The weights used in the file-selection process are not the exact number of textures in the file (since that would require opening each file in sequence), but rather approximations stored in the Prefs file. These approximations are updated each time the file is opened (to set the random desktop texture or to list the textures in the configuratio dialog).
