Animated Water Drop Desktop Wallpaper

CNET Editors' review

by: CNET staff on May 27, 2011

Animated Water Drop Desktop Wallpaper is a free app from Artdocks that creates a realistic effect of water droplets slowly moving down your screen. While it does vary your screen's pixels somewhat, it's not a screensaver; it's a wallpaper enhancement that you can use with your usual background images. The effect is attractive and subtly soothing.

We activated Animated Water Drop by clicking its desktop icon, though there's also a Start Menu entry as well as icons in the Artdocks folder, which also contained an uninstaller for the wallpaper. You can't access the program from the Desktop Appearance controls in Windows since it's designed to enhance your background image, not replace it. The program places an icon in the system tray that let us exit the wallpaper as well as access the developer's Web site, but there are no additional options. We think the ability to set more or fewer drops and change the speed they cascade down your screen would add realistic enhancements, and of course the next step would have to be audio clips with the sounds of rain falling, but that's getting complicated, and part of this program's appeal is its utter simplicity.

This program's effect is attractive and, as we noted, quite soothing, just like watching raindrops on your window. In fact, we could see how setting a desktop background image that appears to look out of (or into) a home's window and then using Animated Water Drop Desktop Wallpaper with it would make for a very relaxing scene and just the thing for a quick break from a hectic day's work.