Desktop Enhancements

Judging from the popularity of desktop enhancements, today's computer users must be tired of looking at the same boring desktops day after day. Even the animated cursors and flashy wallpaper that came with Microsoft Plus! seem dated and stale. Perhaps hardcore computer users are looking for a way to spice up the act of staring at a monitor for hours at a time. Maybe people are procrastinating -- installing new screen savers and desktop pets is certainly more fun than keying values into spreadsheets. Or maybe programmers have exhausted all the good ideas -- why else would so many talented individuals be putting energy into creating silly cartoon characters whose only purpose is to spice up your desktop?

Regardless of the motives behind this phenomenon, desktop enhancements are a popular category of downloadable software. If you are in the mood to make your monitor a bit more interesting to look at, there are a variety of new cursors, interactive screensavers, virtual pets, and screen mates that will liven up your computer screen.

Some of these desktop enhancements hog memory and make your system run too slow. In fact, one reason these flashy animations are so popular is probably because people today have too much computing power -- more memory and hard drive space than they use on a day-to-day basis. If you don't have that luxury, but still want to add some sparkle to your system, try a new animated cursor. There are thousands of animated cursor files available for download from the internet, ranging from cute animals and cartoon characters to violent weapons. These files are ANI animations, created in a specific size, and usually only a few kilobytes in size. Look in your windows folder for a folder called cursors. Inside that should be a folder called icons. Put the new files you download in there, and you are ready to update that stale white arrow into something more interesting. Some of the icons are anything but arrow-shaped, which makes detailed pointing difficult. You might want to keep the regular arrow for normal use, but update the hourglass with an animated pig or your favorite member of the Simpsons cartoon family. To change the pointer you use, go into the Mouse control panel, select the tab marked "pointers," and find the new animation you want to use. You will have a chance to preview the new files before selecting them. Best of all, these won't take up any more memory than your regular spinning hourglass used to.

Another way to spice up your desktop without using too much memory is to download and run a small "desktop pet" program. These programs are like screensavers, but they run all the time. You can find a pair of eyes that stay in a corner of your monitor, watching your mouse. There are plenty of little animals that romp along your screen -- sometimes following your mouse cursor, and sometimes going in random directions. My favorite is Maggie Simpson, the adorable baby of the American TV show The Simpsons. She crawls along the screen, sucking her pacifier, and slowly following your mouse arrow.

Screen mates are a bit more complex than the simple desktop pets. These react in complex ways to your actions -- and often just keep themselves busy without input from the user. Oska and Tahni are screen mates created by Oska Entertainment Systems. They do far more than just follow your mouse around the screen. While you are busy typing, the cute Koala bear named Oska romps around your desktop, skiing, windsurfing, jumping, climbing, and having fun.

Tahni, a busty and barely dressed redhead, jumps on your desktop as if it were a trampoline, flies across the screen in a biplane, and goes snowboarding back and forth across your screen. While she may be dressed a bit scantily, Tahni never takes her clothes off, or performs any other actions that would get a person in trouble for running her at work. The basic screen mate programs are available for a free download. For a US$19.95 registration, you can download additional animations and actions for both characters. The only downside to these characters is that they won't move to the front of any active windows until the window has been inactive for at least a minute. If you keep your windows maximized, you may never see your screen mates. Also, floating windows like Chameleon Clock seem to conflict with the screen mates a bit. Each time the active window is redrawn, it caused the screen mate to disappear for a second or two. After a user-determined span of inactivity, Tahni and Oska will come to the front of your screen and dance or ski across your word processing documents.

While Screen Mates like Tahni and Oska do react to mouse clicks and user interaction, they don't learn from it,or change their behavior. To get a virtual pet with some intelligence, you need a MOPy fish. This amazingly lifelike fish screensaver was developed by Hewlett-Packard and is available for free. The Virtual Creatures team who created the fish have also produced a pet tarantula, which costs US$9.95 to register. These pets replace your screensaver, swimming or crawling around when your computer goes inactive. Unlike a regular screensaver, though, moving the mouse won't make them disappear. In fact, clicking on them, giving them food, and playing with them makes the fish happier. You collect "points" for making your pet happier. After gathering enough points, the proud pet owner can trade them in for virtual fishbowl decorations like realistic plastic plants and gravel. Hewlett-Packard, along with their development partner Global Beach, went to amazing lengths to produce the MOPy fish -- millions of digital photos of actual fish were taken, and an artificial intelligence algorithm attempts to accurately reproduce the behavior of real fish.

WindowBlinds, one of the most popular desktop enhancements -- with more than 1.5 million downloads from download.com -- lets you customize your desktop far more than a screen pet can. A similar program, called Kaleidoscope, has been customizing Macintosh desktops for years, but Windows users can finally achieve the same level of dramatic personalized screens. Each detail of your screen, from the style and color of the scroll bars to the shape of the minimize button, can be redrawn to your exact demands. The redrawn graphic package is called a "skin," and good graphic designers are creating some amazing skins for WindowBlinds and other "skinnable" programs. You can replace your scroll bar, for example, with a sharp-looking chrome-and-neon tube straight out of the Jetsons. Antiques aficionados might go for a carved mahogany-and-brass antique finish. WindowBlinds is about more than just flash -- it adds amazing functionality to your desktop, letting Windows users finally move buttons and add extra function buttons wherever they like.

Of course, alternate skins are available for download over the internet. Two comprehensive skin collection websites, www.skinz.org and www.customize.org, showcase the popularity of skinnable software. More than 80 different programs are listed on these sites as being skinnable, and various skin files are available for all of them. Most of the programs listed are music programs, chiefly MP3 players and recorders. Some other programs include FTP programs like 3D-FTP and web browsers, like the heavily-advertised NeoPlanet. More than a thousand skins are available for some of these programs -- WindowBlinds, ICQ-plus, and WinAmp have the most skins created for them.

If you want to update your system clock with something fancier, another "skinnable" program called Chameleon Clock is exactly what you are looking for. It can replace your normal taskbar clock or function as a floating bar, staying on top of any active applications. This has all the functions you would expect from a high-tech clock program -- reminders, alarms, a built-in calendar, and the ability to adjust itself using the internet's atomic clock servers. Some extra features that are quite nice are the ability to use any WAV or MP3 file as the alarm -- your regular clock radio probably can't wake you up with your favorite song or spoken message. Chameleon Clock uses skins written in the WinAmp format, so there are over 900 styles to choose from. Each style consists of custom fonts, colors, and background.

With so many custom options, from moving creatures populating the desktop, to redesigning the very way the desktop itself looks, why limit yourself? The top of your desk is probably different from anyone else's -- with your own nameplate, stack of papers, and clock arranged the way that works and looks best for you. Your computer desktop should be just as individual. Instead of keeping the same old Start button, plain mouse arrows, and gray scroll bars, you can have a desktop that is uniquely yours.

The World of Skinning -- an introductory primer and history of customizable user interfaces, written by Stardock, the company behind WindowBlinds

Softshape Development has created ActiveSkin, which allows programmers to make their software skinnable.

Chameleon Clock, the skinnable timepiece for your taskbar, is also available from Softshape's website