gCalWall creates iPhone wallpaper containing Google calendar events
Posted on 03 March 2009, at 6:27 am, by Wayne Schulz
Above is my calendar for the week displayed as wallpaper on my iPhone. It’s a great reminder of the events (the next 5 are shown) I have scheduled and all the data was read in directly from my Google Calendar (which is what I use exclusively) and combined with an image of my choosing to create the wallpaper.
There are a couple things you need to know about the application before you purchase it (presently $1.99 in the App Store).
As clearly stated in the description:
- The wallpaper is not dynamic. You must generate a new wallpaper to get any updated events. This is a limitation of the iPhone development environment and not the program.
- Picking background colors can be a chore. For my illustration I found that a solid color worked best as the default text color was set to gray (I changed mine to white so I could read it more clearly).
A later update (not yet available as of this morning) allows you to position the text in the middle, center or right of the screen which will probably help with readability.
- The calendar items are pulled from your Google Calendar. If you don’t use Google for calendar items then you’ll have no use for this app.
gCalWall is a nice way to avoid having to navigate all over your iPhone just to look at what your next 5 calendar events are.
My only real request is for the developer to add some ability to use a default background color. I found that unless I used a solid color that the events sometimes blended into the background making it harder to read.
gCalWall – $1.99 in App Store
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March 3rd, 2009 at 3:23 pm
Wayne – Thanks for the suggestion. I'll look at adding in some default background colors to make things a bit easier. I'm also working on adding the events to the screen prior to saving so its easier to determine if an image is going to work out well prior to saving.
I'd expect the update to come out fairly soon… its been in review for a few days now.
March 3rd, 2009 at 7:25 pm
Yeah the only real issue I have was getting a decent background color — I tried looking for solids like you had on the screen shots but kept getting a lot of busy backgrounds. Other than that I like the concept a lot – especially given that I'm on Google for calendar.
March 4th, 2009 at 2:40 am
Sort of off topic, but I really do not understand the App store approval process. I mean, I get taking a few days/week to approve a new app or game. You need to make sure it does what it says. But why would it take so long on a point upgrade? here is something with a few bug fixes and a new feature. That shoudl take 10 minutes to check out.
Anyway, great job, brandon.
March 4th, 2009 at 4:14 pm
I am afraid that I consider this application, interesting as it is, useless without dynamic updating. Are you really going to go to the trouble of updating the screen manually every day?