Wallpapers from MSN Beta

Curiously "MSN" rather than the Live team have released a beta of "wallpapers".

The app allows you to select from "over 100 wallpapers", and lets you customise the wallpapers by combining elements (background images + foreground images), by adding text, rotating or cropping them. Think of it as a very basic way to create custom wallpapers, but without having to spend any money on programs Photoshop, but still having more power than Paint.

It looks like Thin Martian are behind this wallpaper venture (at least, that is who has digitally signed the installer). Just like the recently released Live Wave 3 Messenger Beta, this acts like a WPF app, but appears to be a native code (rather than managed code in .NET) – at least that’s what a combination of my eyes and ProcessExplorer are telling me.

Be warned that the first 124 wallpapers seem to have to download the very first time you launch the app, or at least thumbnails of, which makes it very slow to run.