If you’re in the market for some great (and free!) photography for your desktop, visit www.interfacelift.com/wallpaper. The free wallpaper comes in a variety of resolutions sure to fit any screen. Don’t know your screen resolution? With a simple click of a link, the site tells you exactly. Before giving this a go, I had no idea the resolution of my laptop screen is 1024×768.
You can search through the gorgeous photographs which include exotic places around the world, PhotoShop designs and more. Aren’t we all sick of looking at the same Windows desktop images anyways? You can sort by artist, most popular, date posted, and specific categories. You should see some of the beautiful beach shots!
InterfaceLIFT also has other desktop enhancements including icons and themes for Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and even Linux. New content is posted regularly so be sure to visit the site often.
Okay well maybe you don’t want to pimp your desktop with other people’s picture, maybe just with your own photos and those of people close to you. Then check out a free screen saver program called Slickr. This web slideshow gallery links to your personal Flickr site and allows you to see your own photos as well as those of your Flickr contacts. Pretty cool. To download your on free version of Slickr visit: http://cellardoorsw.com/?page_id=4.
And then there is the desktop widget phenomena. Here’s where you can have some real fun, and probably waste a lot of time. So beware.
For those of you who don’t know, widgets are small specialised desktop applications that provide services such as showing the latest news, the current weather, a map program, sticky notes or even a language translator.
Finding widgets online is relatively easy, as there’s quite a few sites out there offering these applications for free, allowing you to have a pimped out desktop, even if you’re on a budget. Here’s a couple widget sites I took a liking to.
Yahoo! Widgets boasts an array of over 3,000 widgets. Formerly known as Konfabulator, Yahoo! Widgets allow you to do almost anything with them. But before getting any of these neat desktop applications you have to download the Yahoo! Widget Engine.
Once you have done so, you’ll have all these widgets at your fingertips. Widget categories include Date & Time, Fun & Games, News Feeds, Geek Stuff, Cam Viewers and the list goes on. Some of the pretty amusing widgets include “Yo Mama” jokes, random Chuck Norris facts, a world time clock, a TV listing feed, and a radio widget that lets you listen to certain stations from your desktop
Another fun widgets site is WidgetForge, which also has a wide array of widgets to enhance your desktop. Like Yahoo! Widgets, the site is divided into sections such as General, Date & Time, Alarms & Alerts, Music & Audio, Weather and obviously much more. Each widget comes with a rating out of five stars so you can be sure to get the best ones. One of my faves is the iTunes controller that sits on your desktop and makes listening to iTunes much simpler while computing.
So there you have it—a variety of enhancements to make your desktop just that much cooler. And if the above sites just don’t cut it for you, try a simple search for “desktop enhancements” on Google or Technorati and you’ll be sure to find something to help you pimp out your desktop with your own personal flair.
Have fun!
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