I have the Spotbright and DailyPic Wallpaper apps from Timo Partl installed. They used to work fine. Now after launching they are unable to download any new content. Has anyone else experienced this problem and found a fix?
Kind regards
Chris
I think I have an answer. I noticed that SpotBright stopped returning new content and went looking for alternatives. There's a command-line app called Spotlight-Downloader that I found that worked. I had to write a bash script to run in a Linux WSL2 box to merge the Spotlight-Downloader files with the SpotBright naming convention.
GitHub - ORelio/Spotlight-Downloader: Download Spotlight images and define them as wallpaper and lockscreen image.
That worked for another month, but alas, it started to fail as well. The bright side was that this finally forced me to create a Win 10 VM so I could load up the Visual Studio bloat and I compiled the Spotlight-Downloader from source. I isolated where the download failed, and a few searches later determined that the secure https query was failing because the server/firewall must be rejecting TLS versions below 1.2. Apparently the .NET 4.0 default is not 1.2.
I needed to add
System.Net.ServicePointManager.SecurityProtocol = (SecurityProtocolType)3072;
to Line 50 of Spotlight.cs before the lines
byte[] stringRaw = webClient.DownloadData(request);
return Encoding.UTF8.GetString(stringRaw);
Compiled and tried again and voila, successful downloads.
So unfortunately, I think Timo Partl will have to recompile and update (unless someone knows of a more general way to force an UWP app to use TLS1.2 without recompiling).
Edit: You can also just change the target .NET build to 4.7 for Spotlight-Downloader and recompile.
Last edited by StarfirePrime; 26 Apr 2021 at 22:35.
Thank you for your reply and for sharing a solution. However, changing the code of the app is beyond my ability.
In the meantime I sent an e mail to Timo Partl. He replied that the downloading problem was caused because Microsoft changed their Application Programming Interface. He stopped supporting the app and removed it from the Microsoft store about 2 years ago. As there was still a limited a demand, he fixed the problem and sent me a private link in case I wished to purchase the updated app. I decided to purchase it, and it works fine. Of course if Microsoft change their API in the future, it will stop working again.
Kind regards
Chris
Thank you for your reply. Timo Partl has since updated the app and it now works fine. However, it is no longer a free version and is not available on the Windows store. There are some similar free apps in the Windows store. "Spotlight" is a free app but only with manual download.
Kind regards
Chris
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