ObjectDesktop

Monday, 3:14 pm

By KateC

With the lad gone visiting at his grandma’s house this long weekend, I took double shifts on the Crisis Center Hotline which meant sticking pretty close to the phone. So what better time to play computer than while waiting for the phone to ring?

A couple of weeks ago I found a new computer toy called WindowBlinds, which allowed me to prettify my Windows environment. Lots and lots of skins for Windows and we all know how much I like to skin things. I used it as shareware, which meant some features were disabled. But it was very nice as shareware and I really loved being able to have a Windows environment that wasn’t a basic choice between Window’s XP colors. But, in the course of looking around for different skins, I realized that the extended suite called Object Desktop could really give me a whole lot more. I sprung for it a week ago, but hadn’t had much time to play with it.

It lets me completely redesign my Windows environment to do tasks the way I want them to work. As well as giving a really pretty computer environment. The best way to illustrate what I’m talking about is with a screen shot of my desktop.

The traditional Windows desktop has, in my opinion, been a waste of space. It assumes everyone works the same way and we don’t. Besides being really pretty, my desktop now works for me. The objects you see on the desktop are always there. After I get things the way I want them, I can save the skin and it includes all the objects embedded in the desktop.

The line of dials at the right show me my system resources and I depend on having them handy. They also are programmed to open various menus (documents folder, control panel, task manager, my computer) as well as Firefox and IE.

The thingy at the bottom right of the screen is an mp3 player. I imported my play lists and it is always there for me to use or not.

The object at the bottom left corner of the screen is a weather gadget. It expands to give me an extended forecast. The whitish round thingy on it shows current weather conditions (cloudy at the time of the screen shot). It seems to be updated every couple of hours.

Above that is my To Do list. It’s editable right on the desktop.

In the top left corner is my clock. I can use it as an alarm clock, too. The alarm seems to be a loud thunderstorm which is rather unique. But it works like a charm.

Center top is my calendar which is just a calendar. It shows me different months and years, using the little round button at the bottom right of the calendar.

Top right corner - my radio. It is programmed with 9 different stations. A couple of BBC stations and two Boston NPR stations, WUMB Folk Radio, Virgin Radio, and a couple of others that came preprogrammed.

And then in the center of the screen is my BBC RSS news feed. It updates every couple of hours and the news feed headlines cover World, Africa, Americas, Asia-Pacific, Europe, Middle East, and South Asia. I’ve been loving it.

The windows skin itself is one called Mozilla, though I’m not sure why. I just like the colors and the functions. The windows have a button at the top left that acts like Macintosh’s windowshade. It collapses the window so it fits tightly against the top of the desktop screen so that the desktop is easily accessible. I can also collapse it to the task bar, but I’ve been hiding the task bar more lately to give me more screen space. Having the window able to collapse upward is a real slick feature for me. And having all my menus and available through the dials at the right of the screen give me a lot of extra flexibility.

If you wonder about how much memory and CPU resources this all takes...not very much. With all this stuff going on (on my desktop) and with Firefox and Photoshop open, my CPU was clocking about 8% usage. Of my 392 MB of RAM, I was using about 68%. That’s just a sliver above usual RAM use when I have several tabs in a browser open, several images open in Photoshop, and a radio station tuned in. Stable? Pretty much. Things get a little dicey when I change a skin...the CPU surges up to 100% and it might take a minute for the switch to take place. But I don’t do it very often and that’s the only time I’ve had a slowdown.

Well, maybe it would appeal to a few of you. I’d recommend playing with the shareware version of WindowBlinds first. And see if it’s something you’d like. But it sure has been a thoroughly satisfying find for me.