Automagic Forum

Hello. I know it's a longshot,but could it be possible to stamp images with the contents of variables? example usage would be to get weather info hourly and stamp an image and select it as wallpaper. Not needing Widgets or live wallpapers this way, to save memory.
Anyone know of any plugin that could do this?
thank you

I'd probably delegate watermarking to a remote machine, by sending the watermark text, then download the generated image. Possibly using a CGI script, invoking imagemagick, on a VPN'ed Linux host, sending text by http GET.
But I'd be more likely to write text to an accordingly set up Automagic widget, or launcher item (using Lightning Launcher, there are many ways to control desktop items, including letting them display text, semi-transparent, and dynamically changing, without any widget overhead).
There's a series of posts in the "General" section of the forum, showing how Automagic and Lightning Launcher cooperate.
On a side note, I do something similar on a desktop machine: event information is rendered as text on a screen size black picture, used as wallpaper. Such information includes incoming email, so it also works like a kind of biff. What I use for this purpose is a system called "serafena" (on github), which, again, resorts to imagemagick for rendering. My mobile devices also talk "serafena" (https://github.com/Bushmills/serafena)

I won't go betting my head over this, but I think that it's more resource friendly to use widget. If the use case is the same, the widget could be updated only rarely and generally querying only weather requires less data over network than downloading pictures. Nevertheless, this would be interesting approach to do things.

(Mostly) black background picture with a few words or lines of text plotted into compresses well.

That is true, but in more complex or "noisy" image the file size increases exponentially.

Those tend to be rather unsuited for watermarks, lest the rentered text ought to remain legible.

That depends entirely how the text is rendered. While in the most practical and usable case you are entirely right, it is still a valid point to take into consideration. Not everyone prefers a raw practicality over a little better visuals, like me for example.

Lets keep further offtopic out of here, shall we?!

well,i wasn't thinking black background and white text kind of pictures so,Aldo interesting, the idea of uploading and downloading a 3MB image each hour isn't practical. Since automagic can already do simple image transformations I'm thinking that it isn't too hard to implement. I think I'm gonna go with the widget option or another app altogether like klwp. waiting on a response from Martin though: )

Using widgets is probably the only easy way right now.
There's an item on my todo list to save a widget to an image which would help in this case. It should be quite simple to add this feature so I'll try to add it in 1.32.
I have another item on the todo list to extend Modify Image to combine/blend two images which would also help. Not sure if I'll find the time to add this in 1.32 since I'm currently preparing Automagic to support Android N.