So there’s this blog post by a guy on Planet GNOME who runs a tool, Webilder, that automatically fetches pictures off Flickr as your desktop backgrounds, and that happened to make a picture of himself one. Intrigued about Webilder, I checked for a Mac equivalent, and lo and behold, there it is: DeskLickr. There’s apparently a similar Windows app (boringly titled “Flickr Wallpaper Rotator”) as well, but its website won’t cooperate with me.

I’ve only used it for a few minutes, so I can’t really vouch for potential long-term issues (such as memory leaks…). For now, it looks like DeskLickr mostly does exactly what I’d like it to, with a nice, simple interface. That said:

1. The field “Your username:” actually doesn’t appear to expect the user name you login with, nor your publicly displayed name, but your permalink. Nicely, the text field checks validity live.
2. While downloading, the app’s UI has consistently locked up for about a minute, for me (I just checked; 44 seconds this time). If you try to interact with it during this time, it may beachball as well. Presumably, it’s doing the downloading in the main thread (I haven’t looked). A limitation of the Flickr framework it uses, perhaps?