GUI
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Icon Extractors:
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 AveDesk |
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| Description: AveDesk places desklets on the desktop, but this is not nearly as nice as DesktopX, Kapsules, or Samurize. You can get desklets from DockEx and osx-e, but there really aren't all that many available. | ||||||||||||
 AWicons Lite |
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| Description: AWicons Lite is a decent icon editor, but it has a very non-standard GUI that may make it hard to use. | ||||||||||||
 Change Folder Icons |
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Description:
If you've used a Mac, you know how easy it is assign custom icons to anything.
Windows only provides a GUI for changing icons for shortcuts, but there are some other ways
to bring this long-time Mac feature to Windows, and Change Folder Icons is the best one I've seen.
This tool uses the Windows-standard Desktop.ini file and a can copy the icon into the folder.
This insures you can move the folder to another machine (or browse this folder on a shared drive) and always see the icon.
Folder Style (below) is another good choice for this kind of tool, but for around the same price (~$20),
Change Folder Icons does a better job. If you don't mind a slightly less polished tool (or don't want to pay $20),
try the nice-and-free Folder Iconizer.
Other folder-customizing tools that I looked at (and found wanting) include:
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 Custom Places |
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| Description:
Customize the places bar (the vertically-aligned shortcut icons on the left of
Windows open/save dialog boxes). You can also make similar changes if you're handy with
regedit; see this Microsoft page for
Places.dll for Office 2000
(a DLL to edit the Places Bar, like this Custom Places, for Office 2000 apps), this
other page for Office 2000 (registry info),
or this page for
Office 2002
(support for Places Bar editing is built into Office 2002!).
Nov 2, 2006: The download link of the official page seems broken. Try this download link. For a somewhat related utility, check out Folder Guide. |
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 DesktopX |
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| Description:
DesktopX (like ObjectDock) is a component of StarDock's
ObjectDesktop. DesktopX (like ObjectDock) is free, although
it does have an annoying "upgrade" nag screen on startup.
DesktopX places objects on your desktop (just like
Kapsules and Samurize use widgets and configs,
respectively). There are an unbelievable number of objects
available at
WinCustomize.
DesktopX has a built-in object editor. It's not as powerful as Samurize's config editor, but you can use it to edit other objects, customize them, and save them. If you're willing to spring for the "full" version of DesktopX ($20), you can export objects as widgets, binary executables that use DesktopX as the run-time environment (see some examples at WinCustomize. If you're want to export objects as stand-alone executables (to distribute them to people who don't have DesktopX installed), you can buy DesktopX Professional for $129 for personal use or for $499 for commericial SW distributions. Oh, one other thing - DesktopX comes bundled with IconX, a tool that takes over your desktop icons to make them a little nicer looking, bigger, customizable, more interactive, etc. IconX takes a long time to load, so unless you love this feature, disable it in the IconX tab of the DesktopX configuration and DesktopX will become a lot faster to load! |
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 DM2 |
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| Description:
This very cool little app allows you to minimize windows to icons on your desktop,
much the same way many UNIX window managers do. You can also minimize to the
System Tray if you wish (but that's more crowded than my Taskbar!).
Another neat feature is the ability to set window opacity! Tired of moving windows around to see the info you need? Set your topmost window to be partially opaque and then look through it to see what you need underneath! |
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 Folder Iconizer |
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| Description: This handy little tool allows you to assign custom icons to any folder, not just folder shortcuts. This is free, but if you can afford the $20, Change Folder Icons is a little easier to use. | ||||||||||||
 Folder Style |
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| Description: This handy little tool allows you to assign custom icons to any folder, not just folder shortcuts. I prefer Change Folder Icons to this tool, though (they're both around $20). | ||||||||||||
 Fresh UI |
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| Description: Another powerful "tweak" tool, goes right up there with TweakUI and X-Setup (both below). | ||||||||||||
 IcoFX |
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| Description: A nice, free icon editor - supports transparency! | ||||||||||||
 Liquid Icon XP |
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| Description: A free icon editor - supports transparency! There's a newer version (1.0.4), but it has serious problems that the company is aware of (icons sometimes lose all color when saving). | ||||||||||||
 Kapsules |
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| Description:
Kapsules (like Yahoo! Widget Engine, Samurize,
DesktopX, and AveDesk)
places widgets (or configs, objects,
and desklets for Samurize, DesktopX, and AveDesk,
respectively) on your desktop. The widgets are usually easy to create (for a programmer)
and can monitor/control various things, like hard disk usage, the weather, iTunes, etc.
I think Kapsules is a little easier to use than Samurize and much nicer than AveDesk.
Yahoo! Widget Engine and DesktopX seem to have the most widgets/objects available, but Kapsules
is one of my favorite programs, especially once you consider the
iTunes widget.
You can find more widgets at WinCustomize, too. |
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 MuralPix |
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| Description: A nice wallpaper manager that works off of folders, so you can just keep adding images to a folder, without having to keep updating a file list in this tool. Also, MuralPix can create a "frame" around the photo from different patterns, but color-coded to match the image - it's a very nice effect! | ||||||||||||
 ObjectDock |
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| Description: ObjectDock (like DesktopX) is a component of StarDock's ObjectDesktop. ObjectDock (like DesktopX) is free and is a nice program. It basically immitates the Dock in MacOS X. You can add tons of docklets to ObjectDock (try DockEx and WinCustomize. Try the Volume docklet, or SysStats (which is supposed to be ultra-powerful, but I can't get it working). I'd like ObjectDock more (and would use it to replace the Windows Taskbar) if it showed the names/titles of all the open applications/folders/windows without the user having to mouse-over each one of them. That makes it too hard to find a specific window, so you might as well keep the Windows Taskbar and use DesktopX, Kapsules, or Samurize to get some of the cool docklet functions. | ||||||||||||
 Samurize |
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| Description: Samurize is a dream for power-users and GUI-hacks! Each Samurize config creates a new item on your desktop (like widgets for Kapsules and desklets for AveDesk). The config can be a simple thing like a clock or a CPU meter, or something advanced like a complete control system for iTunes (see Power Tunes). Unfortunately, for each config you want to run at the same time, you have to spawn a new Samurize client, each of which puts an icon in the System Tray. With all the cool configs you might want to run, you can fill up your system tray quickly! The most powerful feature of Samurize, though, is its built-in config editor! You can look at each of the GUI elements inside a config, move them around, change the functions they control - even find ways to combine multiple configs into one new customized config! Even though I slightly prefer Kapsules, this is truly an amazing piece of software. | ||||||||||||
 SnIco Edit |
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| Description: This can be a pretty good icon editor, but I find it incredibly buggy (trouble importing, access violations, etc.) | ||||||||||||
 TClock Light |
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| Description: A handy little tool that lets you customize the time display in the taskbar (you can even add the date). You can also customize the "Start" button. This is one of the first things I install on a new PC! | ||||||||||||
 TweakUI |
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| Description: A hard-to-find control panel from Microsoft that lets you tweak a ton of things in your user interface (UI). | ||||||||||||
 WallChanger |
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| Description: A slick wallpaper-changer. One caveat - I need to turn off Active Desktop's Show Web Content option. I've used this for years, but it doesn't seem like you can download it any longer. Try MuralPix instead. | ||||||||||||
 WindowBlinds |
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| Description: A popular tool for customizing Windows. I don't use it anymore because an older version used to crash my NT too often. | ||||||||||||
 X-Setup |
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| Description: A power-user's dream! Customize everything about Windows. | ||||||||||||
 Yahoo! Widget Engine |
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| Description: Yahoo! Widget Engine (originally called Konfabulator) is absolutely the coolest thing I have ever seen on a computer! It's a Javascript engine that runs widgets, which are pieces of code and graphics that integrate seamlessly into your Desktop. There are hundreds of widgets available - some show you the weather, some control your iTunes, some are just silly (like the Yellow Submarine), but there's no end to the originality of these widgets. Besides, if you have a little programming experience, it's easy to create your own - or hack someone else's! | ||||||||||||
GetIcons
ICanView
Icon Sucker
IconDeveloper
Icons Extract
Icon from file
The Greek Grabber