Mural

This is the smallest project on this list, and one of my favourites. It does one job — cycling wallpapers on a schedule — and treats every other decision as a chance to be less annoying. Building it taught me more about restraint than anything larger.

What it is

A Windows utility that cycles through the images in a folder at a chosen interval, with a dark settings window for the folder, the timing, and the image that waits underneath when rotation is off. It remembers where it stopped in the sequence, so a restart resumes instead of starting over. The window can hide into the system tray, where a small menu turns cycling on or off and shows the current state honestly. It can also launch with Windows and stay silent when it does.

One window, three settings, no surprises.

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One window, three settings, no surprises.

What it taught me

• Restraint is a feature. The app does exactly one thing, and every temptation to add another was answered with "that's a different app."
• One number carries the whole tool. The sequence position is the entire memory the app needs — and if it forgot, nothing else would matter.
• The best interaction is none. Launching into the tray, restoring the default image when cycling pauses — the goal was to never interrupt, and "never interrupt" turned out to be a demanding spec.
• Polite defaults are design. Hidden startup, a tray menu that shows the truth about whether cycling is on, the fallback image always one step away.
• Small apps teach fundamentals cleanly. Startup modes, persistence, packaging, settings — with no architecture to hide behind, every basic mechanism had to be understood rather than imported.

Where it stands

Finished, and quietly running in the tray wherever I've installed it — which is the entire point.