Wallper 1.3.3: An Apply Button That Tells You What It Is Doing

Applying a wallpaper takes a moment. Not long, but long enough that an interface which says nothing during it will be clicked again.

That is not user error. A button that looks exactly the same after being pressed as before is telling you, quite reasonably, that nothing happened. So you press it again. Now two apply operations are running, racing each other to set your desktop, and whichever finishes last wins.

1.3.3 is about making that impossible.

Feedback While It Works

The Apply button now shows a small spinner with a subtle fade and scale while the operation runs.

The animation is deliberately understated. A control that flashes dramatically every time you use it becomes tiring in an app you touch many times in a session. It needs to be enough to answer the question of whether something is happening, and no more than that.

The busy state also propagates properly through the interface now, so the whole app knows an apply is in progress rather than just the button you pressed.

No More Duplicate Applies

Buttons disable while busy.

With the busy state propagating correctly, this is straightforward: a control that is mid-operation cannot be triggered again, so duplicate applies cannot start. The race condition disappears rather than being made less likely.

Apply Happens on Its Own After a Download

Downloading a wallpaper now applies it as soon as the download completes.

Almost nobody downloads a wallpaper in order not to use it. The two-step flow of download, then find it, then apply it was an accurate description of what the software did internally and a poor description of what people wanted, which was to click a wallpaper and have it appear on their desktop.

Along with that, a set of small timing adjustments across transitions in the app. Individually invisible, collectively the difference between an interface that feels tactile and one that feels approximate.