| Getting Started With ScreenThemes
(PLEASE READ) |
ScreenThemes is a program that can put full-screen, high-resolution images on your PC every day: either as wallpaper or in our screen saver. We've designed this help document to get you up and running with ScreenThemes as quickly as possible. We know this is a lot of text to read, but please do read it. ScreenThemes offers quite a few features, and this is the only place they're documented. Here's a quick tip: Open the ScreenThemes program and hit your ALT & TAB buttons to toggle back and forth between this help document and the program. Follow our simple instructions in each section below and you'll have ScreenThemes mastered in no time! You can also go to our Tech Support Page if you have a specific problem or question.
ScreenThemes is a program designed to display vibrant full-screen images on your PC every day: either as wallpaper or in our screen saver. It has two basic modes: interactive and startup. The startup version executes every time you boot your PC. If it's the start of a new day, it will pick a random image you haven't seen before, and make it your wallpaper. When you double-click on the interactive version, it opens a window with a display of thumbnail images that looks something like a slide sorter tray. All the images, either from our free trial or from the collections you've purchased, are displayed here. If you would prefer to hide the images you have not seen as wallpaper, click the Options menu and uncheck View Unseen Images. The thumbnail interface may not seem terribly useful at first, but once you have accumulated several image collections, you'll probably begin to appreciate it. One day you might say to yourself, "There was a great picture of the Grand Canyon two months ago -- I'd like to see that one again." The thumbnails make it easy to find it and set it as your wallpaper.
ScreenThemes comes with a screen saver that acts as a slide show, displaying all the photos from your image collections along with hundreds of eye-catching transitions. It supports full stereo sound and hi-fidelity music via WAV, MIDI, and MP3 files. Use your screen saver as a "jukebox", playing random songs, as well as songs that provide theme music for your image collections. You can access the Settings screen by clicking the "Screen Saver" menu in your system tray. For more information on how to associate sounds with your ScreenThemes collections, please see our sound and music help file. For general screen saver information, see our screen saver help file. Before we move onto the next section, we'd like to leave you with a nifty little shortcut. Hit the "W" key while your screen saver is cycling through your images. Presto! Instant wallpaper.
4. The Main (Thumbnail) Interface NOTE: We often use the term "thumbnail", "slide", and "image". They are interchangeable. We're not going to explain everything here. Most of it is obvious once you get started. If you haven't already, please open ScreenThemes. You'll notice that the first slide is a little darker than its neighbors. That's because it's selected. If you single-click on a slide it will highlight by turning a little darker. You can move the selection around by clicking the mouse, or by pressing the arrow/home/end/page up/page down keys. Another thing you should notice is the information below each thumbnail. It shows the image title, the image collection it came from, the size of the image (useful for determining which ones you want to delete later on to save disk space), and the last date it was set as wallpaper. There's an empty space in the lower right corner of each slide: that's where you can put your personal rating. It's based on a scale from 1 to 10, 10 being the best. (Of course, if you prefer a scale of 1 to 4, that's fine, too: it's up to you.) If you review your slides periodically and set the ratings, it will become easier to sift through them later on. You can rate an image by selecting "Set Rating for..." in your system tray. If you see an image you want to make your wallpaper, simply double-click it. Some images have descriptions attached to them. Simply right-click on the image (or on the tray icon) and select "Description" from the menu. Reading these can add a great deal to the enjoyment of owning ScreenThemes, since they often describe more detail about each picture. Not all image collections include descriptions, but we try to include them whenever possible. You can sort the images five different ways from Sunday. Click the Sort menu and sort your images by rating, collection, file size, etc.. As we said, you can delete images anytime you like. Once you've deleted it, however, it's gone. There's no backup. The only way to get it back would be to re-download the entire image collection. If you've gone through all the images in a collection, and you no longer want to see images from that collection, you can go to File / Select Image Collections. This brings up a checkbox list, and you can check or uncheck any collections you want. The selections you make here will affect which images you see in the thumbnail display, as well as which images are used in the random selection of old and new images.
You may or may not have noticed by now, but ScreenThemes does not have an icon bar that appears on the taskbar with all the other currently running programs. It does, however, place a small icon in the system tray on the right of the taskbar. It either looks like three red, green, and blue balloons or simply says Star Wars. If ScreenThemes is hidden (minimized), you can double-click this icon to bring it up again. You can also single-click it to get a small menu of neat features. You can keep ScreenThemes minimized all day, and at any time you can reach over, right-click, and have it "instantly" change your wallpaper. You can quickly change your background texture, add a monthly calendar, hide your desktop icons, associate music files with your collections, or adjust your screen saver settings; all directly from the system tray. Now that's trés cool! If you want total control over which image to pick for your wallpaper, go to "Wallpaper", then "Select ScreenThemes Image". This will bring up a tree list of all the collections and images you own. In parentheses next to each collection is the number of unseen images from that collection. Simply click on the "+" sign next to a collection (or double click the collection name) to see the names of all the images in it, along with the last date each image was set as your wallpaper. Double-click on any image to make it your wallpaper. One thing we designed into the program is that the close button will probably not exit the program. You can double-click the leftmost button on ST's title bar, or click the "X" button on the right -- either one will most likely leave the tray icon running. If you want to really shut it down, select File / Exit from the menu, or Close from the tray icon's popup menu. You can modify this behavior by going into the Daily Schedule dialog. At the bottom is a recycle timer setting and two checkboxes labeled "Remain in system tray in case of resolution/color depth changes." If the timer is set to recycle images periodically, ST must remain in the tray to accomplish this. If the timer is not set, you have the option of keeping it in the tray or not.
6. Setting Your Daily Schedule As we said earlier, ScreenThemes will, by default, show a new wallpaper image at the start of each day and then disappear. But ScreenThemes can also update your wallpaper during the day. By selecting Options / Set Daily Schedule, you can see what your options are:
The default setting is to reveal a new wallpaper every day. If that's too slow for you, you can always change it to reveal a new image every 4 hours. It will go as often as once every hour. Along with the startup options, ScreenThemes also offers auto-change options. If one image a day is a little too spartan for you, but you don't want to burn through lots of new images, you can set ScreenThemes to re-display OLD images as often as you like. For instance, you can set "new images" to once a day, and "old images" to every 3 hours. That way, if your day starts at 9:00, you'll get a wallpaper change around 12:00 and 3:00. If you're a real wallpaper freak (like us), you can set it to auto-change old images as often as every minute. That's probably not a real good idea, but it's up to you. If you prefer to use just the screen saver without changing the wallpaper every day, go for it! You can now disable all automatic wallpaper functionality by clicking the top check box on the "Daily Wallpaper Schedule" screen.
ScreenThemes also lets you use your own JPG files as wallpaper images. Click on the ScreenThemes system tray icon to popup the menu, select "Wallpaper", then "Select Any JPG File". This brings up a file browsing dialog. The left listbox shows folders; the right listbox shows JPG files within the current folder. The name of the current folder appears directly above the left listbox. To go into a folder, double-click it. To go back up out of a folder, double-click the ".." file entry in the left-hand list. (This may sound confusing, but it will make sense once you use the dialog box once or twice.) This dialog box also lets you make a few minor modifications to the image before displaying it as wallpaper. You can rotate and flip the image, and even have ScreenThemes try to trim off the sides if there is empty space (common with scanned images). If you want to use your own images in the screen saver, go into the screen saver's settings (as described in a previous section) and in the lower-left of the settings dialog box you simply tell the screen saver which folder(s) you want the screen saver to pull images from.
We update our software and our web site on a regular basis. Please see our ScreenThemes News page for recently released image collections, software upgrades, and special offers.
A pop-quiz question: What keyboard combination is the ScreenThemes user's best friend? Hint: it utilizes the "Windows" key (if you have one). Answer: "Windows" + "m". This minimizes all windows (except ScreenThemes) so you get an instant view of your ScreenThemes image. Hey, don't thank us... Microsoft came up with that one!
If you have any further questions, you may want to take a look at our Tech Support FAQ or you can contact us directly with any questions you might have. Thanks again for choosing ScreenThemes!
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