Backgrounds 11.2

Backgrounds is a desktop application designed to optimize the appearance of your screen. This program beautifies your desktop with nice, animated, and attractive wallpapers, most of them with stand-alone applications or handy widgets at their basis.

The application installs as a small icon placed on the Mac system's upper bar, so that you can switch at any moment among the six themes provided by default, or combine them to achieve an original and classy desktop look. Unlike common wallpaper tools supporting rather ordinary images, Backgrounds makes use of particular Mac apps, time-related features, system information, or embedded image wallpapers to bring style and elegance to your screen.

Music fans may want to enjoy their favorite audio tracks while working at the computer. Not only can users listen to music and feel relaxed during their daily activities, but they can also receive information related to the album, the name, and the artist of the playing song. The background of the tagged report consists of the track’s artwork, which you can easily define as wallpaper for your screen. As a novelty, this skin supports playing the video that matches the current track, except that only the audio of the video is rendered, while the image is available through the Video Theme.

With this remark, I have anticipated the existence of another exquisite theme that enables you to substitute your static-image screen with a playing video. This way, you have the ability to watch video clips on full screen while letting other computer processes run in the background. Unfortunately, only the MP4 file format is supported.

However, if you prefer a picture as your default wallpaper, you can use the Parallax theme to make the image more interesting and appealing. Once this feature is enabled, it will give an impression of depth and distance to the images on your desktop. You just need to hover the mouse over your preset image background, and the picture will flip smoothly on its axis, creating a sensation of gentle spatial motion. Furthermore, you can add multiple images to the Pictures folder and set the program to change the wallpaper image automatically at specific time intervals.

System reports, as well as time-related information may be used as the basis for animated and handy widgets. They will give you real-time information related to the current date and time, CPU performance, and details of the download and the upload speeds. Both the System and the Time themes are highly adjustable in terms of transparency, color, and position on the desktop. They may appear either individually on the screen or accompanying the Parallax, the iTunes, and the Video themes.

All these elegant-looking backgrounds are meant to customize the appearance of your screen in order to confer a more comfortable working environment. Without a defined interface, the program stays hidden in the system tray, always ready to change the theme and to have its parameters tweaked with a mouse click. In addition, the price is more than reasonable, considering the stylish and handy skins provided.