Variety 0.4.10 was released today with several major new features, most of which were requested by users during the previous weeks:

Support for Media RSS feeds



This means that now Variety can fetch images from sites like Picasa, deviantART, interfaceLIFT, SmugMug, and can make use of much more aspects of Flickr (e.g. user’s favorites). This massively increases the diversity of image sources that can be used in Variety.

Support for World Sunlight Map



World Sunlight Map is great as a live wallpaper that shows realtime clouds and sunlight information and changes during the day. This also works great together with the clock feature.

Option to display current image source

There is now a menu item Display Source – when you click it it will focus in the Preferences and visualize as thumbnails the image source from which the current image came from. This makes it much easier to decide which sources are worth keeping and which bring too much crap.

Visualization of recently downloaded images

Recent Downloads shows a thumbnail view with the recently downloaded images and makes it very easy to manually select previously unseen pictures for a wallpaper. The option is in the menu only when downloading is enabled.

Simplified menu



The indicator menu was getting quite hairy. Previous, Next and Pause/Resume are now in a separate submenu – scrolling over the indicator is a much faster way to perform these operations anyway.

Command-line options

A running instance can now be controlled from the command-line which makes it possible to define keyboard shortcuts or Unity quicklist items for the most common operations (e.g. Next, Previous, etc.). Run variety --help to show the available options:



Usage: variety [options] [files or urls]

Passing local files will add them to Variety's queue

Passing remote URLs will make Variety fetch them to Fetched folder and place them in the queue

To set a specific wallpaper: variety /some/local/image.jpg --next

Options:

--version show program's version number and exit

-h, --help show this help message and exit

-v, --verbose Show logging messages (-vv shows even finer debugging

messages, -vvv debugs variety_lib too)

-q, --quit Make the running instance quit

--get, --current, --show-current

Print the current wallpaper location. Used only when

the application is already running.

-n, --next Show Next wallpaper

-p, --previous Show Previous wallpaper

--fast-forward Show Next wallpaper, skipping the forward history

-t, --trash Move current wallpaper to Trash. Used only when the

application is already running.

-f, --favorite Copy current wallpaper to Favorites. Used only when

the application is already running.

--pause Pause

--resume Resume

--toggle-pause Toggle Pause/Resume state



Version 0.4.10 can be obtained from Variety’s PPA: ppa:peterlevi/ppa

Enjoy!