Bionix Wallpaper

Editors’ Review

Download.com Staff May 15, 2011

Bionix Wallpaper Lite is a portable freeware version of an extensive desktop wallpaper management utility. It simplifies the process of creating, saving, and cycling your desktop wallpaper displays. It supports a wide range of image formats, with more added regularly via regular updates, as well as drag-and-drop, hot keys, variable window opacity, dual monitors, and magnetic windows. It can display the current time as wallpaper, too. It even supports Active Desktop in Windows 98.

Bionix Wallpaper’s system tray icon gives access to its tabbed settings dialog and its main interface, which resembles a media player (WinAmp, to be exact) in appearance and function. Bionix is based around playlists created out of your libraries. It provides a sample Playlist containing a few images that might not suit younger or more prudish users, though it’s easy enough to deselect or even delete any or all of them. The program let us configure how images fit on the screen, associate a default image editor, select resample modes, configure hot keys, and set other housekeeping and performance options. The Changer interval control offers a much higher degree of precision than the Windows tool, with selectable intervals in seconds, minutes, or hours and a slider for fine-tuning. Bionix uses media player controls to activate playlists, with Play/Pause, Stop, Forward, and Back arrows that give a familiar feel. We quickly created and saved a new playlist with our display preferences, and then opened it. Bionix displayed our Playlist in a split-view file list and preview pane; clicking Enter set our wallpaper. The display fit as we set it and changed when we told it to.

Some of the features in the full version of Bionix Wallpaper are present but inactive in the Lite version; clicking them called up a message offering to let us download the for-pay version. These inactive features include the resampling quality and logo overlay options. While Bionix Wallpaper doesn’t so much add new capabilities to Windows as replace a built-in capability, it’s definitely an improvement.

Full Specifications

What’s new in version 8.16

Version 8.16 provides support for Webshots WB1 file format.

General

Release June 27, 2014 Date Added June 27, 2014 Version 8.16

Operating Systems

Operating Systems Windows 2003, Windows Vista, Windows, Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows 8, Windows Server 2008, Windows 7, Windows XP Additional Requirements None

Popularity

Total Downloads 32,644 Downloads Last Week 105 Report Software