Steampunk desktop themes: your screenshots

[Mr Tibbs]

Following on from your collection of icon images, your incinerator recycle bin inspired me to come up with my own**. I found the copper mesh bins were too "new" looking for my good self at the moment. They need a bit of roughing up, although I've yet to figure out how to do this with basic Photoshop commands/find the right texture to overlay.







**I'm also penning a tome on plagiarism.




It wasn't my idea.

Mr. Tibbs

[yereverluvinunclebert]

I don't mind who uses mine and no doubt I will use yours if you make more progress than me!

Put some glowing coals in the holes of the bin... see what you can do, then some shadows below, those things are normally on legs, at least that is what I was going to do!

[yereverluvinunclebert]

Current desktop with new steampunk weather widget in the middle, tells the temperature, pressure, humidity and gives a nice image of the weather too.



This is the smaller gauge that replaces the miniature centigrade gauge.

[Keeper of the Brass]

Looks great, when can we have it?

[yereverluvinunclebert]

Keeper of the Brass - It's on its way - I am just skinning a bit of one of the drop-down functions and then I need to make the outer clock function, easy enough just a bit of work to do. Then the main weather indicating hands need to be adjusted and made more steampunk. Everything else works. I'm glad you like the look of it. The trouble is I am so interested in creating the new widgets that my attention is distracted from completing the previous...

On my previous long post regarding the windows desktop front running without explorer.exe shell - I found that minimising current open windows to the rocket dock resulted in a messy and unpleasantly wide Rocket dock so I turned off that functionality.

That meant I was missing the ability to switch between tasks using a mouse click. I could still task switch using coolswitch + alt/tab but I missed the funtionality to be able to click on a visible icon to toggle an open window. You can cause Rocket dock to "open the running application instance" rather than start a new one each time but I have found that it does not always work. In any case you can often have more than one instance of an application, I currently have more than three four firefox windows and I want to be able to select which one.

To fix this I now have a little application called MiniMize from Stephen Kew that minimises your apps to thumbnails on the desktop. A little bit like how Windows 3.11 used to do things. Vista/windows 7  users will be familiar with the thumbnail pop-up that the taskbar provides. It is similar to that but the thumbnails are movable around the desktop. I'll post a picture of my increasingly cluttered desktop shortly.



Elmer Befuddled/Mr. Tibbs - I was thinking of creating a widget that tells you if explorer is using 100% cpu giving you a button that allows you to kill and restart explorer.exe. I know this has bugged you in the past!

[Serenitas]

My desktop with winamp and music folder opened:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[yereverluvinunclebert]

The steampunk Weather widget is now available for download. It gets the current weather from internet weather sources, providing temperature, humidity levels, local air pressure, as well as the general weather outlook in hundreds of cities around the world.

It looks like this:



And it is available for download here:

http://widgets.yahoo.com/widgets/steampunk-weather-gauge

It has been fully tested but it may not yet be perfect. Please test it and report any faults and I will fix them. When it is fixed I will submit it to Yahoo Widgets. Thanks for your help in this!

It will make your desktop quite a bit more steampunk and it is useful too especially here in England where the weather is really rather variable.

Some stuff to do before it is completed:

// add sounds to the pointers
// add an option to hide/show the 24hr clock
// add an external resizing control
// add live link to LQ on the about us PSD and the code
// Add a fahrenheit/centigrade toggle

Apart from that if you can think of anything else then let me know.

[Keeper of the Brass]

Hi yereverluvinunclebert,
Working fine on Windows 7 (64 Bit) & Looks great, time to look at dual monitors?

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

16 Degrees Celcius at the moment..

[yereverluvinunclebert]

Keeper - your desktop is really rather...steampunk!

[ZenGwen]

It isn't at the moment, but this was my desktop image until recently...

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

...and it made me squee quite a bit.

I'm loving the beautiful (and functional, by the looks of them) desktops people are putting together. Really must upgrade to Windows 7 while I can still claim a student discount.

[Keeper of the Brass]

Hi ZenGwen,
It's making me Sqee quite a bit too, I'm sorry Steampunk & princess don't belong in the same sentence.

yereverluvinunclebert,

My desktop is looking like a showcase of your widgets? And loving it......

[Mr Tibbs]

I'm liking your desktop as well Mr Brass Keeper. The only thing letting the side down, for myself, is the shortcut arrow overlay. Be rid of it!!

[Keeper of the Brass]

Hi Mr Tibbs,
I agree, how do I get rid of them?

[Mr Tibbs]

Hi Mr Tibbs,
I agree, how do I get rid of them?

You're on XP, yes? If so you need to add a string value in your registry to change the icon that it uses.
Open Regedit and navigate to [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Shell Icons]. In the right hand window, right click and select New String Value. Name it 29. Then when named, Double click it and then enter C:\Windows\System32\shell32.dll,50 as its Data Value. OK your way out of the registry.
This code saved as a .reg file will do the above for you:

Code:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Shell Icons]
"29"="C:\\Windows\\System32\\shell32.dll,50"

Now GoTo Display Properties>Appearance>Advanced. In the drop down menu, choose Icon. Change the size and apply. The icons will change and the cache has been cleared. Then change the size of the icons back to your original size.

If you're not on XP but on Vista or 7 the same principle applies, In their case though the number 50 icon used in XP isn't the correct blank.
In this case you need to point them towards a Blank.Ico which contains all the correct sizes (e,g, 256sq). To this end I gathered a small kit together aeons ago that contains a homemade Blank.ico, guaranteed not to show as a black square overlay, a .reg file similar as detailed above and a petite instruction notelet that is so simple even my good self can follow it!! It's on MediaFire for those that require it.

[Keeper of the Brass]

Hi Mr Tibbs,
I'm on Windows 7, will this be the same?

[Mr Tibbs]

Sorry, I was updating last post as you posted! See above post. (It was your narrow taskbar that threw me!)

[yereverluvinunclebert]

Mr. Tibbs knows his stuff.

ZenGwen - Too many gaudy princesses for me too, perhaps one at either side of the screen, framing it, with a nice workspace in the middle.

Everyone - whilst on the subject of running without explorer.exe and the Windows ugly shell, there is a good windows start menu replacement called Jetstart. It is free and can be called from Rocketdock. I have used the zodiacal icon to call Jetstart.  



This means when the windows shell is shutdown (you've killed explorer.exe) then you still have access to all your programs through Rocketdock.

Jetstart is here:

http://www.codesector.com/jetstart.php

It isn't particularly steampunk it is just a useful replacement for something nasty...

[Keeper of the Brass]

Hi Mr Tibbs,
Thanks for your advice, the shortcut arrow overlay's are gone, it looks much tidier.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

yereverluvinunclebert, I had a look at Jetstart but it isn't supported on Windows 7 (64 bit), so I'm giving XYplorer a run, looks good so far. Now all I need is a relacement for the taskbar & start menu & I'm on the way. I've already replaced the boring logon page.

[Polaris]

Wait, so all these fantastic widgets are for WIndows? Not Mac?

  *sob*

[yereverluvinunclebert]

Polaris, No, you are pleasantly misinformed. The clock widget, the weather widget and the nixie tubes are all MAC compatible as long as you have Yahoo widgets for MAC installed - they will run! The only one that is Windows specific is the CPU/GPU thermometer widget, at the moment it does not have MAC support but will have in the future. I just need to get hold of a Mac to test the Mac OS/X specific code.

These are direct links to the yahoo widget engine, so you can download it here. Yahoo widgets works for Mac OS/X or Windows.

Mac OS/X
http://desktopwidgets.zenfs.com/4.5.2x10a50/yahoo_widgets_4.5.2.dmg

Windows 2000 - 2008, NT5/6, XP, Vista, Win 7
http://desktopwidgets.zenfs.com/4.5.2x10a50/widgetsus.exe

[yereverluvinunclebert]

A view of my desktop with the latest version of the weather and cpu/gpu thermometer widgets. Both with their new help screens raised. The latest version of the weather widget displays the pressure in either mmHg and millibars and allows the 24hr clock to be hidden. These will be released shortly and I will update this post when they are ready.

[Amara Deegan]

Thanks to those wonderful Steampunk themed Yahoo! Widgets, here is what I have going for my desktop so far:

[yereverluvinunclebert]

A very 'holmesian' area to work, nice to see my widgets used, I still do get a thrill from seeing them on someone else's desktop. 17,000 downloads so far from all the download sites combined but only a few give a review, would you be able to give a positive review on the widget page?

I am working on the CPU/GPU thermometer widget to get the printer working. It also now acts as a console for starting perfmon.exe and taskmgr.exe so you can start to take action when the system gets hot. A few other changes will be introduced at the same time, most graphical but some functional. I'll update here when ready.

[Tamarand]

Hi guys

I'm only just come out of 'lurking' and have shamelessly downloaded all these yummy goodies... BUT... I don't think the CPU monitor thingy is working properly. What is it actually supposed to do? As in physically? Are the little scratchy things supposed to make lines on the paper when it's open? And is the fan (which I also downloaded) supposed to do something when it gets hot? My temperature gauges don't actually do anything... 

Also, I keep trying to go to that Mediafire link which Mr Tibbs so wonderfully provided, but it won't let me! When I try to hover over the link to click on it it moves!! Honestly... the whole line of writing moves, and the whole post shivers and wobbles! It's very peculiar... Might someone be so kind as to repost the link please? Or to just copy it out without it being an actual link so that I can copy and paste? I would be eternally grateful 

[Tamarand]

Oh... just read yereverluvinunclebert's last post... obviously the scratchy paper thingy doesn't work yet then so forget that one  

(Double posting as I was unable to modify until erm... just now!   )