---
title: "Discussion on \"How Live Wallpapers Render Beneath Your Desktop Icons on Windows\" | Hashnode"
description: "Discussion on \"How Live Wallpapers Render Beneath Your Desktop Icons on Windows\". yyzTools includes a live-wallpaper engine — web pages and videos rendered under the desktop icon layer. Playing the content is the easy part; the entire hard problem of a wallpaper engine is the windo"
url: "https://hashnode.com/posts/how-live-wallpapers-render-beneath-your-desktop-icons-on-windows/6ac258dab4f5af9afc5581f3"
---

[Feed](https://hashnode.com/feed) /

Discussion

# [How Live Wallpapers Render Beneath Your Desktop Icons on Windows](https://yyztools.hashnode.dev/how-live-wallpapers-render-beneath-your-desktop-icons-on-windows?utm_source=hashnode&utm_medium=feed)

yyzTools includes a live-wallpaper engine — web pages and videos rendered under the desktop icon layer. Playing the content is the easy part; the entire hard problem of a wallpaper engine is the windo

Oct 4 · 5 min read · yyztools.hashnode.dev  
Read the article

## Written by

[yyzTools](https://hashnode.com/@yyztools)

@yyztools

  
[View profile](https://hashnode.com/@yyztools)

Sharing thoughts on developer experience, Windows tooling, and the indie dev journey.

I'm an indie developer building yyzTools — a Windows productivity suite with a command palette, OCR, translation, clipboard history and more. Most of my time goes into C++, Win32 and WebView2, and I write about the lessons learned from shipping desktop software solo.

## Responses 1

Markdown supported · ⌘↵ to post

[Adam Lewis](https://hashnode.com/@nark3d)

[Oct 11](https://hashnode.com/posts/how-live-wallpapers-render-beneath-your-desktop-icons-on-windows/6ac258dab4f5af9afc5581f3/comment/6acbf7e5f207f3ca0e735610)

Windowing is where I expect this gets nasty. Compositing beneath the icon layer means working against a surface that was never designed to have anything behind it, so tell me how you handled it. Does the engine own a child window of the desktop, or does it hook the composition pass itself? Does the same approach survive a multi-monitor setup where each display has its own wallpaper and its own refresh rate?