This week in skinning
First week of July..
Friday, July 8, 2005 by Frogboy | Discussion: WinCustomize News
Summer is here and that means lots of people are outside. But fear not, there's also been lots of activity in the Windows customization front as people check out the cool things in MacOS Tiger and Longhorn and start to try to spruce up their PCs.
In the article front, here's a guide I wrote on different ways of using the popular Windows customization suite, Object Desktop. You can read about that HERE.
Meanwhile, in terms of actual goodies to download for your computer, I came across some neat stuff:
Star Wars Yoda is a replacement boot screen for Windows XP. It looks totally cool and sure beats that standard Windows XP logo.
Speaking of Star Wars, I found a cool looking light saber replacement mouse cursor here. You use CursorXP to apply it. If you're looking for something a little more..well normal the Encoded mouse cursors are pretty cool too.
For you widget lovers out there, I found some pretty cool stuff. These widgets use DesktopX. Once you have DesktopX intalled on your computer, these widgets run like any other program except widgets use less memory to do what they do than traditional programs use (which is one of the points of using widgets). The On-Time clock widget is pretty nice. There's a gazillion clock widgets out there already but this one is particularly nice.
One of the most interesting widgets I've seen lately is the LCARS MP3 widget. It lets you specify which media player you want to control (iTunes, Winamp, Media Player or its own built in one). For anyone who is really into Star Trek TNG, this is definitely worth getting.
Meanwhile in icon land, there have been some incredibly cool icon sets packaged up with IconPackager 3. There's Luna Alt, Icon-A-Day, and the Encoded icon package. All are very nice and all are incredibly cool.
If you have ObjectDock Plus, there's some cool new backgrounds out too. I'm partial to the Gizmo background myself.
You maynot have heard of Rainlendar before, but it's a free program for giving you skinnable calendars. While there are lots of calendar widgets out there, the difference here is Rainlendar only does calendars so it has really specialized on making them very useful. NWC Blue
and elsdee RL are two recent ones that look good.
Customizing wouldn't be complete without wallpapers of course and here are a few I liked in particular:
Over in Windows Media Player land things have been somewhat quiet lately but the World of Warcraft skin for WMP is pretty cool.
In the GUI skinning department, there's been a lot of activity lately. Visual styles or whatever you want to call them change the look & feel of the Windows GUI. The most popular way to do this is with WindowBlinds, a program that extends the native visual style engine to support all kinds of cool new stuff.
Mr. Clean is like the name implies.
My Longhorn is a pretty solid attempt to get Windows XP to have the look and feel of Longhorn complete with an alpha blended Start menu.
Also in the "clean" style is MoonBlinds.
And finally, Pixel Pirate who has all kinds of cool stuff lately has made Encoded as a visual style as well.
So that's all for now. Until next time, don't be a drone, make Windows reflect your style.
Reply #2 Friday, July 8, 2005 4:23 PM
An at a glance look at whats been going on in the world of skinning....
for those of you that like a darker skin with atmosphere, DMN-TWEAK-R2, found here : Link : looks like its developing a strong following.
( sorry ! Temptation got the better of me....
)
Reply #3 Friday, July 8, 2005 5:41 PM
Reply #4 Friday, July 8, 2005 6:10 PM
Reply #6 Saturday, July 9, 2005 5:54 PM
http://www.starwars.com/flash/ep3/img/wallpaper/6/800.jpg
http://www.starwars.com
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Reply #1 Friday, July 8, 2005 3:22 PM
You even mentioned a few I apparently missed between work and power outages.