Dynamic wallpaper

On mobile devices they could be used for a long time already: dynamic wallpapers. While iOS only features colorful moving bubbles on the screen, Apple has now introduced a dynamic background image of the Mojave desert with macOS Mojave. This will show the desert depending on the local time - either by day or by night. In addition there is a - in my eyes rather ugly - day and night picture of a course of the sun.

Using Task Till Dawn and the workflow described here, you can easily create dynamic background images yourself and use them not only under macOS, but also with Windows!

What you need

  1. The "Retrieve current date and time" Action
  2. The "Set desktop background image" action
  3. An appropriate background image for each hour of a day

The workflow

In this workflow the background image should be changed every hour according to the current time. To determine the correct file name for the current hour we need a variable with the current time-of-day. This variable can be obtained via the action "Retrieve current date and time".

After that the background image can already be updated with the action " Set desktop background image". The prepared background images should all be structured according to the scheme <Image name>_<Hour><File extension>. So for example
wallpaper_1.png
wallpaper_2.png
wallpaper_3.png

Select one of the images and replace the time in the file name with the previously defined variable. When inserting the variable, select that you only need the hour of the current time.

Now the schedule of the task only has to be set so that it is executed every hour.

Workflow that changes the desktop wallpaper every hour
Sample workflow that changes the desktop wallpaper every hour

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