Recently, I had to reformat due to my computer becoming infected with a disease known only as EventScripts. Though we are fighting valiantly to find a cure for this dreadful disease by working on ESE, my box was a casualty of such a cruel fate.
Being the enterprising young lass that I am, I decided to change up my desktop, since I was sick of looking at it.
I decided to throw out my edition of SharpE and BBlean (both crashed far too often and sucked a lot of CPU, though less than explorer), and try out BBClean.
BBclean is based off of BBlean, which is based off of BBWin, which is the windows port of BlackBox, a popular window manager that sits on X.
It is designed to be lightweight, but still feature rich. Also, it purports its more stable than bblean, which I was banking on.
Here is the result:
Expanded:
http://www.rcrowbar.com/not_idle_complete.JPG
Now, this isn't all in one, like explorer. Each and every thing you see on the desktop is a plugin (though a few of them come standard). Also, some of them are other programs. Here is a marked up version:
http://www.rcrowbar.com/marked_complete_desktop.JPG
Where did all that stuff come from?!:
Standard Plugins:
BBLeanBar: Provides the system tray and the bars at the top and bottom of the screen.
BBLeanSkin: Provides the basic theme for the WHOLE thing. Any window that opens up that isn't in the exception list is converted to fit the theme, automagically.
BBKeys: (not shown) provides a basic interface for intercepting key presses, which is used to display the start menu whenever you right click (also not shown).
Extra Plugins:
The first three provide the corners, which let you see them even if a window covers them (unless it is a full screen window)
Corners:
BBWinAmp: Provides the bar at the bottom left, which lets the user manipulate winamp.
BBSysMonPlus: Provides the bar at the top left, which lets the user see their system info.
BBInterface: This is a little more awesome. it lets you build your own buttons, put anything you like in them, and basically write your own menu's and such. It provides the right top and bottom displays by interfacing into BBSysMonPlus and BBWinAmp. You can do a lot of really cool and intricate stuff with it, like design your own task menu.
Lesser:
BBMemo: Lets you write text directly on your desktop, for making small notes and stuff.
BBCalendar: Seems pretty self explanatory to me.
BBShelf: This is the neat little bar at the bottom (which can close, like a shelf) that stores all my most used programs. Its a little hard to add new ones (text editing) but its worth it. And it looks cool.
If you want to try bbclean, you can have my exact desktop (minus the shelf and background picture), plus a skin maker!
http://rcrowbar.com/bbclean.rar
I took off the shelves because they are a little unstable. You can add them back in through the plugin menu though.
So what is the other stuff on my desktop?
Winamp:
Well, as you see labeled, the two circles are winamp. It is a skin called HAL, and is really neat, though a bit difficult to use. I've never seen a winamp skin with documentation before XD The buttons are all along the edge of the circle, so memorization is key. It really just looks cool, since I have a lot of other winamp manipulation tools already.
MirandaX:
MirandaX is the IM client I use, which is a prepackaged version of Miranda, an open source IM client. Miranda is hard to use because you need to get every plugin working perfectly to use it, but MirandaX just packages it all up for you. Much easier to use than Trillian, and less crappy than Trillian. Here is a picture of how it looks:
http://www.rcrowbar.com/MirandaX-window.JPG
All of the windows match and it matches the shell pretty good. The only hard part was getting BBclean to stop setting its colors; Miranda uses a bunch of .dll's, and all of them have to be restricted for BBclean to not touch it. Ten minutes, and it all worked fine.
http://rcrowbar.com/MirandaX.zip
FireFox:
I use Red Shift v2 (sounds like Blue Shift to me, and it looks good), with a lot of plugins. I have 27 extensions for firefox, and I use pretty much every one. However, a lot of them are special purpose, and you only see a few in the picture, while the rest work behind the scenes.
FoxyTunes: It seems weird to have two winamp controls, right? But this one is pretty damn awesome.
ForcastFox: Now I don't even have to look out the window! Fuck the outdoors!
Gmail manager: Very useful for checking mail without actually opening up the page
FEBE: This backs up your everything. Without it, my firefox would still be under repairs; I happened to have a backup from long long ago. Wonderful addition.
FoxMarks: Backs up your bookmarks to some server. Useful if you have multiple computers (my main use for it).
Picture:
http://www.rcrowbar.com/firefox-window.JPG
As you can see, everything matches the shell, even though FireFox provides its own settings for most of it.
And that is it! Though, I like the portals background. Fuck yeah. Soon I hope to have turtles and shit running around my desktop *using the Interface plugin).
Linear Mode
