The first time I took up Samurize was documented in this previous post. Having successfully removed the clutter from my desktop workspace, the background developed a potential for functionality. At that time, I chose to turn it into an at-a-glance Heads Up Display of sorts for things like battery life, processes, CPU, hard drive and RAM usage. In the intervening years, the little widget on the bottom-left corner of my desktop evolved from being amateurish eye-candy to a more utilitarian box of bars and numbers.
It was adequate and useful, but generally a bit of an eyesore because it looked so out of place. So pitiful was the design that I even set a keyboard hotkey to hide the thing from view. For the most part, I prefer form and function to walk hand in hand and those previous attempts left something to be desired. However, I never bothered to change it because I never really had any particular urgency, or any particular inspiration, to gussy it up.
Last week, a blog post on Lifehacker popped up on my radar. They have been featuring the desktop customizations of an enterprising and generous individual. Naturally, seeing something awesome makes me want to be awesome too.
I won't burden you with having to see the 'before' desktop (it was boring) or with how it was created, per se, as Samurize has a bit of a learning curve that cannot be expained with words as well as it can be learned from trial and error.
Here is the new one:
Click the screenshot for notes. Click here for full size.
List of Programs (etc) that contributed to this desktop:
Overall Theme: FlyaKite w/ Leopard 3.0 Visual Style (Dark)
Wallpaper: Dawn in Madrid
Windows Explorer Address Bar: QT Address Bar
Windows Task Bar: Finderbar 3.1
System Tray: Dexpot and Notebook Hardware Control
Application Launcher: Launchy 2.0 with MinimaLaunchy skin
Dock: ObjectDock with Konfabulator Glass skin, Leopard GTD Icons
Desktop Monitor: Samurize, collapsible self-made config
System: Asus Z63a Pentium M 1.83 GHz running Windows XP SP3
20.11.08
Nerd Corner: Samurize
tags:
art,
nerd,
Nerd Corner
posted at
18:25
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
ohhhhhhhhhhh i like the bottom corner thing! with the date, time and the computer info stuff!!
did you also make the bar part of that? or else how do you get the shading to look the same as your > button?
The bar on the bottom corner is a picture made in Paint.NET.
Samurize can use pictures you have on file, or create backgrounds with its own image tools.
For this bar, I created the open version (full length) first and overlayed the arrow image on the far left. Then I cropped the right end to a smaller size and overlayed a reverse image of the arrow to created the 'closed bar' button.
Post a Comment