I was listening to Windows Weekly on my Zune this morning, and Paul’s Pick of the Week was the Bing Dynamic Theme, which dynamically displays new photos from Bing as your desktop background. Awesome… this is just like Webshots back in the day! (Errr… I guess they are still around at http://www.webshots.com/. We’ll use that information in a second.) When downloading the theme, I noticed that it is only 1.86KB. That’s a small file… it must be doing some magic behind the scenes to download the actual pictures. That large RSS symbol in the thumbnail is a pretty big hint as to where they come from. I downloaded the theme to my desktop, opened it in Notepad, and the structure is rather clear (and fully documented on MSDN here: Creating and Installing Theme Files. The theme file basically says to keep the icons and sound effects as their defaults, and to download pictures from an RSS feed. So… if you want to make your own theme with pictures off the Internet, just copy the following text, paste it into Notepad, and change the 3 highlighted areas (the Display Name is what shows up in the Theme control panel as the name for the theme. The RSS feed at the bottom must have the pictures as enclosure. Read more: Greg's Cool [Insert Clever Name] of the Day
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