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Animated Christmas Snowflakes

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Description

** PLEASE READ IMPORTANT NOTICES BEFORE DOWNLOADING FOR BEST EXPERIENCE **
Realistic Animated Christmas Snowflakes by Laurence "GreenReaper" Parry - images by PixelPirate
Bring the winter snows to your desktop! Features hundreds of swaying, wind-swept flakes floating in the background. Click the snowman to change user options, which include maximum number of flakes (actual count is balanced for idle CPU use), flake interval (lower = faster), gravity and settle time on the bottom of your screen. Try the flakes out today - no need to wait for Christmas!

* PLEASE READ: You must hide desktop icons or be in IconX mode for best performance. This snow uses lots of objects, and these objects must be at desktop level to perform well. This will only work if you are hiding the desktop icons (this option is on the Theme tab when configuring DesktopX), or are in IconX mode. If you do not do this, expect high CPU usage and a low number of flakes. Sorry, that's just the way Windows XP works! Expect improvments in Longhorn. :-)

* READ ALSO: This does not occur on all machines, but if you find DesktopX's user interface freezes up above a certain number of flakes, please terminate DesktopX via Task Manager (Ctrl+Alt+Del/Processes tab/right-click DesktopX.exe/End Process) and restart with a lower value for Max Flakes - it should restart with the previous session's settings, not the ones that locked up. This should not affect other programs, only DesktopX. Make sure you have the very latest version of DesktopX available as future updates may fix this.

Having said the above, do experiment with the settings to find the best level for your computer - the initial settings are conservative, particularly the Max Flake count. The snowflake script will automatically compensate for CPU usage by other programs by removing snowflakes when CPU use is high, and adding them back when it is low - you should be able to run this object in the background without trouble, although you might want to set it to 0 flakes while gaming.

Flakes are customizable - just clone another OriginalFlake or replace existing images. Text works too, try some floating Wingdings! You may also tweak certain variables in the script - see script comments. Many thanks to PixelPirate for creating the snowman and settings dialog images for this - all rights are reserved for these. You may use this script in your own objects as long as they are free to download - edit the snowman's script for details.

The wallpaper in this skin shot is available here.

Would you like to know more about these snowflakes? Read the related article!
Some useful comments are at the WinCustomize posting of this object.

** DID YOU READ THE ABOVE INSTRUCTIONS BEFORE DOWNLOADING? Yes? Good. :-) **
















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EmmetEarwax's avatar
When I had a working Apple ][c+, I wrote a program that showed a Robert Frost poem, "stopping by the woods on a snowy evening". If that wasn't the title ,then recall the last line. "and miles to go before I sleep". The snowflakes (* signs) would trickle down and yet the message would not be messed up.

Well, now my Apple ][c+ is long bummed out (quit without reason, and they were no longer fixing them.) and I have long forgotten how to write machine code,or hand-compile. I just wanted to let you know, my dear norn, about the animated snowflake program I wrote when I was younger....