The macosxhints Rating:
[0 to 10 lights; 10 = perfect!]
- Developer: M. Scott Marcy [Product Page]
- Price: Free
Tired of the included desktop patterns? Don't like using photos instead? Try StarfishX, the desktop pattern generator. The easy to use GUI features options galore for creating cool desktop patterns. Start by picking a desired size and make a selection from the 15 pre-defined starting color palettes ("Spring," "Summer," "Autumn," or create your own), and decide whether you want the pattern to fill, center, tile, or stretch on your desktop. Click the New Pattern button, and StarfishX goes to work with your settings and some random numbers to create some truly amazing destkop backgrounds. You can optionally control the seeding of the random numbers that create your image, and StarfishX will remember any number (up to 500!) of your recent patterns for easy re-use.
Depending on what you're asking it to do (and what else you might be doing in the foreground), it can take a while to generate the patterns, as there's a lot of number crunching going on behind the scenes. One nice touch in StarfishX is that its dock icon changes when it's creating patterns -- instead of the full-size icon you see here, you get a very small icon along with a constantly updated miniature version of the pattern being generated. This makes it easy to keep an eye on the process, and you can quickly tell if the random pattern will be to your liking or not (there's a Cancel button to halt processing and start over if you don't like what you see).
Given my limited graphics skills, I've also found StarfishX useful as a starting point for web background images, Keynote presentations, etc. The GUI is easy to understand and I've never had a problem with a crash, and it's free and open source!

