Trickout Your Desktop.
January 21st, 2012This is what my desktop looks like right now (Click to embiggen!).
This amazing visual is created through several customization programs. The most noticeable is Rainmeter. This is a customizable desktop widget program. It’s responsible for everything on the left, right and top of the screen as well as the giant clock and weather forecast in the center. Some of the widgets (which Rainmeter calls skins I have installed include
- Battery Life
- FaceBook Feed
- Google Calendar
- Word of the Day
- Network Traffic Monitor
- Weather forecast
- Sunset/Sunrise/Moon Phase
- Disk Monitor
- CPU/Ram Usage
- Windows Update Notifier
There are a bunch of other, small skins spread around like my IP address. This was built using the Enigma Theme (Themes are collections of skins). Each skin is controlled through simple text files. The Rainmeter manager program lets you open individual text files and change their values. You can screw up a skin royally with this, but generally it’s pretty simple to adjust hex values for colors, X and Y coordinates, and enter URLs for email and Facebook.
Along the bottom I use two pay-for solutions called ObjectDock and WindowBlinds, both by Stardock. ObjectDock creates a Mac-style shortcut launcher along the bottom of the screen. It’s pretty customizable with different looks and animations. I have mine set to expand the icons when you mouse-over them. WindowBlinds adds new themes to Windows, but gives you more customization than the defaults you get with your computer. I have a Carbon Fiber theme applied.
ObjectDock and WindowBlinds are both pay-for product. I found that RocketDock is a good, free alternative to ObjectDock. After I took this screen shot, I decided to add a new toolbar to the top of the screen. This one would have 5 programs that I use for my weekly computer clean up: Windows Update, CCleaner, Glary Utilities, Auslogic Disk Defrag and Acronis TrueImage. I run the first four programs to clean up and the last one is for monthly backups. RocketDock (the free one) doesn’t allow you to have multiple docks, but ObjectDock (the pay for one) does. So I just created a new dock and put 5 tiny shortcuts in it.
Overall, I spent about 6 hours lost in customizing and Googling .INI files to get these three programs tuned to perfection. I find they all load very fast. Soluto says that ObjectDock takes 0.7 seconds to load, WindowBlinds takes. 0.1 seconds and Rainmeter takes a full second. So 1.8 seconds of bootup, for a futuristic and functional desktop; I’ll take that.




















