Circles III : Gaia

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An update of my Circles 2.1 pack, expanding it to 120 icons. It is now also available in 8 different colour schemes drawn from the Gaia09 project.

As a digital musician, there is a slight focus on music software, but there are nearly 90 other icons for all major operating systems.

Cartoon fox for Firefox icon by ~Bucinhas.
Sample background image by =lassekongo83.

The full list of icons:

Creative
Acrobat - After Effects - Air - Bridge - Contribute - Corel - Design - Dreamweaver 1 - Dreamweaver 2 - Encore - Fireworks - Flash - Gimp - Illustrator - ImageReady - InDesign - Inkscape - OnLocation - Photoshop 1 - Photoshop 2 - Picasa - Premiere - Soundbooth

Music
Ableton Live - Audacity - Cubase - Foobar - FruityLoops - Garage Band - iPod - iTunes - Logic - ProTools - Real - Reason - Record - Recycle - Renoise - Sonar - Songbird - Sony SoundForge - Spotify - Torq - Traktor - VLC - Wavelab - WinAmp - Windows Media Player - Zen - Zune

Office
Access - Excel - Office - OneNote - Open Office - Outlook - Planon - PowerPoint - Project - Publisher - Word

System
Apple - Clock - Computer - Configure - Drive C - Drive D - Drive E - Drive F - Drive Z - DVD/CD Drive - Files - Games - Gnome - Mail - Movies - Music 1 - Music 2 - Photos - Recycle Bin (empty) - Recycle Bin (full) - Restart - Sleep - Start - Tools - Ubuntu - Windows

Utilities
CCleaner - CD Burner XP - DVD Shrink - Xplorer2 - FileZilla - Nero - Notepad - ObjectDock - QuickTime - RocketDock

Web
Browsers - Chrome - Digsby - Facebook - Firefox - Firefox 2 - Instant Messaging - Internet Explorer - Limewire - Opera - Pidgin - RSS - Safari - Skype - Thunderbird - TweetDeck - Twhirl - Twitter - Twitter 2 - uTorrent

Making Windows look like MacOS

One key difference between Windows and MacOS systems is the font-smothing technique used by the different operating systems. Personally, I much prefer the look of fonts on MacOS systems with the smoother lines (though Microsoft's Clear Type is arguably better on 8pt and below fonts).

A handy little plugin for Windows called GDI++ makes Windows render it's fonts with the smooth lines of MacOS. Download it, unzip it, double click on GDItray.exe and you're off!

It will take some time to get used to it (a couple of hours), but once you are used to it, you will never switch it off.

Download.

Circles 2

I've created a series of seventy one icons for your RocketDock / ObjectDock customisations. The icons come in 256 x 256 pixel PNG format. Enjoy and share!

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Customising Your Desktop pt.2

I just enhanced and edited my previous post about modding your Windows Desktop, so it's now a part of the new Tutorial section of the Fwonk* Forum. Read it here.

Customising Your Desktop

Customising my desktop has become quite a geeky hobby of mine. The above image (click for full size image) is my current desktop at work. I have a similar setup at home. The task bar is on auto-hide, though I have the SlanXP2 theme installed.

Using TweakUI I have removed all of my desktop icons - I just don't like them cluttering up my screen! So the key to navigating through programmes and folders is this little box down in the bottom right. I have this sitting over the top of all my other programmes, though I can click through everything bar the icons themselves.


This is a combination of two highly useful programmes. The time, system details and transparent black background are a customised version of the Enigma theme for Rainmeter. This is a highly customisable utility that sits in your system tray and provides all manner of information you might need.

The black icons is a customised version of RocketDock. This features the Stacks Docklet, which allows grouping of icons - as seen here, I have my Microsoft Office programmes under one icon.

This is only the beginning for your 133t h4xx0r5 out there, who go into far further detail, using EmergeDesktop and LiteStep and all manner of shell custom programmes.

There are all manner of sites out there to help you get or create your own wallpapers too. Try a few of the follwing:

• deviantART
• Customize.org
• InterfaceLIFT
• Lifehacker

Get hacking!