2014 was a great year with its ups and downs. I have been pretty busy and stressed, but now that the end has come, I am finally on vacation after years without this much free time. In doing so, during the Christmas holiday I have started a new toy project: a GNOME Shell extension.

Patterned Wallpapers was inspired by Pattrn, an Android app created by our fellow oldschool GNOME hacker Lucas Rocha. It is a GNOME Shell extension which gets you a new patterned-wallpaper automatically every day/week, as specified in the metadata.json file. The patterned-wallpapers are downloaded from the COLOURLovers public API. COLOURLovers is a  community where people from around the world create and share colors, palettes, and patterns.

gnome-shell-extension-patterns already has a preferences dialog which allows you to set the kind of patterns you want (popular or random), set the frequency of updates (daily or weekly), and clear the cached wallpapers. These settings are gsettings, which means that they can be changed using dconf-editor or manually with the gsetting command line tool. All pattern images are stored in the backgrounds/ folder inside the extension’s folder ($HOME/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/patterns@felipeborges.github.com/backgrounds/).

You can automatically install it on the GNOME Shell extensions website or unzip the source code into your gnome-shell/extensions folder.

In the future, I want users to be able to browse through patterns, mark them as favorite, search by keyword, and list their wallpaper history. These goals are issues in the project’s Github repository. Contributions are appreciated!