Cube Mine

Today I finished the wallpaper resolution selector and now it's possible to download a wallpaper with the exact dimensions of your screen. There's an automatic detection script so you should only have to click the download button. If you change the resolution the preview should also change (my first AJAX!). But before I started this update, I did a small analysis of the resolutions visitors were using.

The resolution I speak here is the size of the display, in pixels. The many resolutions fall mainly in three categories, according to their aspect ratios: 4:3, 5:4 and widescreen. The 4:3 was pretty much the standard when the CRT was king. Now, thanks to LCDs and projectors, the other ratios are becoming the norm.

For almost a year now I've been collecting resolution information of my visitors using Google Analytics . Although this is hardly any reference, it shows what resolutions one looking for wallpapers use:

It's interesting to see that 800x600 is a lot less frequent than in other sites. Maybe these users don't really care about customizing their background or maybe they just don't see the background since any window takes a good portion of their screen

The aspect ratios are more or less equally distributed, with 5:4 slightly less common:

The 4:3 standard is still the most common, but only by a small margin. Given that most quality wallpapers on the net are still made for 4:3, widescreen wallpapers are an increasing trend.

Now that it's possible to select which wallpaper resolution to download, it will be interesting to see if these numbers change. Anyway, I hope to analyze this again in the future and with any luck 2560x1600 displays will be much more common then.

—Ratow