Feel like pimpin' out your desktop? Well there are tons of websites
out there offering free stuff, from wallpaper to screen savers to some
pretty funky widgets, all to make your PC just that much cooler.
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!