Tag: Wallpaper »

Personalizing your iPhone wallpaper isn’t a difficult process, the hard part is finding the right image. This could be made a great deal easier with the recently updated iWallpapers app from JokeShuffle.net. The free app offers over 15,000 images with more added daily, all sized to perfectly fit your iPhone or iPod touch screen. The images are also of surprisingly good quality across a wide range of categories from movies to sports.

What sets this app apart from its rivals is a unique navigation and feedback system that makes picking a background easier and keeps the focus on the images not menus. When viewing a background, a translucent bar floats to the side of the image and offers a number of options from downloading the image to your phone, through giving feedback and even watching a slideshow of images within this category. The app requires an internet connection to work properly and we would recommend Wi-Fi to keep things running smoothly. As it’s free, iWallpapers is also ad-supported, but beyond this it’s a brilliant tool to have to hand when you feel like spicing up your iPhone and will also become even more important when the custom background feature in iPhone OS 4.0 is released.

Welcom to the Design A GelaSkins Gallery Page. All submissions are added the night of submission so if you don't see yours right away don't fret, it will be there in the morning. To keep things honest voting will not take place until all the submissions have been made. In the mean time feel free to make comments about them at the bottom. Click here for more contest details. Spread the word!

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Endless Walls is an application that displays a slideshow of wallpapers from Flickr and allows you to copy then to your camera roll for later use as wallpapers. The problem with this is that it looks like many of the images used in Endless Walls are copyrighted. Even though the images are loaded directly from the Flickr servers, this is still an application that ignores any sort of copyright or do not download settings the owner has set on their images. I'm not sure how I feel about this.

It would be easy enough to go to one of the Flickr groups that were created to index iPhone sized wallpaper images and download them directly to your iPhone in Mobile Safare. So is this application doing anything different? Well, yes. For one they are charging for the ability to do this. They are also ignoring the setting that the owner has set to keep people from downloading their images. Next, they are not even displaying any of the metadata for the photo such as who uploaded the photo, title, etc.

Another thing, they claim that there are over 7,000 wallpapers. Then why do I see so many duplicates? Inside the Endless Walls bundle, there is a file called cache.xml -- while I'm not sure that this file contains all of the images used, it does contain only 2,000 unique URLs all pointing to Flickr.com image servers.

Motacore.com, the developers of Endless Walls were asked if they though their use of copyrighted images in this application was OK and this is their response:

That's a very interesting point that our attorney may have overlooked. Thank you for bringing that to our attention. I will speak with our counsel as soon as he is available for a meeting.

While Flickr is currently one of our bigger sources, we are in the process of moving away from it to a user submitted (submitted to us) cache of wallpapers.

Way back in the pre-historic days, you know before the App Store, when there were other ways to get application on the iPhone, there was an application called Wallpaper, developed by Sean/Big Zaphod, who now works for Tapulous. It was a great and similar app but all of the wallpapers were user submitted directly from their iPhones. Seems like that is the direction that Motacore is heading. (And here's hoping we'll see an official version of Wallpaper, too!) Motacore is targeting the end of September, 2008 for this move. We'll see how it goes.

So, in the end, I'm torn. This is a really easy application to grab new wallpapers on your iPhone, and fairly well developed. But legally and morally it just doesn't seem right. So I'm going to have to leave this application at 0 stars. In the end you will need to make your own decision. Once they move to a user-generated and submitted version, we will re-visit it.