Google has always been great at coming up with new ideas to fill a gap in the Internet or software market. Its latest creation, FotoWall is designed to help you quickly produce photo montages, which you can use as desktop backgrounds.
The first thing you'll notice about FotoWall is its quirky user interface, which is one of the most cumbersome of any consumer imaging app I've seen. Adding photos can only be done by dragging and dropping them onto the interface, and unless you know that beforehand you'll spend about 10 minutes looking for an 'Add image' button, trying to right-click to open some kind of menu, or hovering the mouse over various parts of the screen for clues. Oh yeah, there's no help menu either.
Once you've eventually sussed out how to put the photos into FotoWall, they can be resized and rotated using the green and red buttons that appear on the bottom of each picture. Try changing the background gradient color or the text color and you're transported back into a world of pain as you wrestle with the randomly-located pop-up palettes that seem to have a life of their own.
When you've finished creating your collage in FotoWall you can render it out as a PNG, choosing your compression level ready to set it as your desktop background. The results are generally uninspiring though, due to the limited control you have over the editing of the document (for instance, you can't even change the horrid default font).
Google is renowned for creating great apps. Unfortunately FotoWall is not one of them.
