Interactive wallpaper (windows)

[Delark]

Hey,

I would like to know if it's possible to create an interactive windows background using flash. I've searched the net, and found out you could do it back in the xp days, that Vista had it (sort of, .dream thing) and that it has been kicked out of windows 7 development.

Problem is, it has to work on "all" possible windows systems.

Just a clarification that it can or can't be done is enough for me. So I can continue or stop the search. (:

Kind regards,

Delark

[Northcode]

Active Desktop, in Windows XP, allowed you to put HTML pages on your desktop but it was discontinued in Vista and is gone from Windows 7. It was a security nightmare. There are "replacements" popping up but they are just windowless applications that run on the desktop. Depending on what you need to do, one of these solutions might be what you need.

The more popular third party swf2exe tools can also be used to do this if you're looking for a Flash based solution. In SWF Studio (my product) you could create a small windowless application that constantly sent itself to the bottom of the Z-order so it looked like part of the background and never appeared above an application window.

The problem you're going to run into with ALL of the alternative solutions is that you can't tell where the desktop icons are so you can't automatically position your little part of the dsstkop where it won't interfere with the user's icons. You can let the user move the application around and "stick" it somewhere but that's about the best you can do.