Chromebooks may soon signal the start and end of your day with custom wallpapers
ChromeOSmay be about to give us the time of day. Well, rather, more times of day with which to feature different wallpapers. It all began with the long-awaited, much-anticipated debut ofautomatic dark and light mode cyclinglast year which allowed not only the GUI to change colors based on the time of day, but also changed the wallpaper as well. But there soon could be more opportunities for users to change their wallpapers without having to lift a finger.
According to recently-merged commits in the Chromium Gerrit (via9to5Google), ChromeOS will not only change wallpapers when it switches from light to dark or vice versa.
There will benew wallpaper “modes"for the “morning” and in “late afternoon” that can be set based on somenew scheduling logicthat goes beyond accounting for just the local sunrise and sunset times. These new periods are intended to cover the first and last thirds of available daylight in any given day, respectively. Presumably, the regular light mode wallpaper slots in during the middle third.
New feature flags also indicate “Time of Day” dependence for both wallpapers (#time-of-day-wallpaper) as well as screen savers (#time-of-day-screen-saver, which requires the first flag to be enabled). Speaking of, videos are also expected to jointhe existing options for screen saverswith Google providing two clips thatsound quite time lapse-y to us: one’s titled “Clouds,” the other “New Mexico.”
Most of the work for these changes looks to be complete, so there’s a chance they may come under Chrome 113’s feature freeze on March 9 — ChromeOS’s stable rollout is set for May 4.
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