Ever find yourself glancing at your desktop looking for a shortcut for more than a few seconds ?

People will sometimes choose beautiful pictures that aren’t fit to be a wallpaper. The heart of the problem tends to be the lack of contrast between your icon/s and the wallpaper it’s sitting on. That’s why an Icon can lurk in some dark/bright corner of the screen and almost get swallowed by the beautiful wallpaper you chose to put there.

For once I had enough with that I decided to write a small program that will find your icons and make sure they don’t blend in with your desktop, all this in an elegant way ofcourse as I’m a design/elegance freak.

I know I could have taken the icon-positions from the desktops Image-List, but that’s just too easy I wanted to try out some image-processing, so here’s what I did :

• Take a clear screen-shot of the desktop.
• Calc the |difference| between this and the user’s wallpaper. (so logically the icons should stand out).
• Remove all the noise, as in take only the big differences.
• Run a Maximum-Filter, this will expand that area consumed by the icons.
• Divide into a grid, then try to Flood-Fill each point in the grid to find the areas from the previous step, then bound these areas with nice rectangles.
• Give these rectangles round-corners, a border, and make them semi-transparent.
• Blend back with the Original Wallpaper, and there we go.

I used the Corona Library for loading/saving images.

And I decided to start using the GPL for source-code I release, so here we go.

Note: The program currently works with ‘Stretched Wallpapers‘ only, changes will be pleasantly accepted.

Download: Source, Binary.