Cubik

Lifehacker, a GTD-oriented site I'm addicted to, often features articles on power users who customize their desktops. Most recently, they featured a particular user, Kaelri, who wrote a guide on how to recreate one of his most popular designs, Enigma. He even provided a .zip file with all the files you'd need.

This isn't just about changing the wallpaper and reorganizing the icons, mind you - we're talking about a complete rethinking of thinking of what a desktop should do.

These users are a lot like car enthusiasts. There are those who enjoy all the accouterments and want as many gadgets, lights, bells and whistles they can afford, and then there are those who would rather strip out everything unnecessary and focus on pure performance. If the tone didn't give it away, I fall into the latter - in both situations.

With that in mind, I would like to present to you my humble creation... Cubik.

I'll break it down into sections for you in a moment. First I should mention a core change: I have replaced the default Windows shell with the open-source Emerge Desktop. There is no taskbar or Start button anymore. And so we start with the first detail, clockwise from the top left:

System Tray

Now, I understand this is hard to see, but if you look closely you can make out some icons. This is the system tray, which I was able to control much more with the Emerge shell. The icons are at 20% opacity right now, which reminds me they're still there (they are always on top, even over windows). When I hover over the tray with the mouse, they become fully visible.

Rocketdock

Rocketdock is a clone of the Dock of Mac OS X fame, and it's a nifty free utility. It works much the same as the Mac dock, even with the bounce of icons when clicked. Since the taskbar is no more, I needed somewhere to store minimized programs; this does the trick.

Rainmeter Enigma Config

Rainmeter's a hell of a program; it can display nearly anything you want on the desktop. I took Kaelri's config and modified it a little, removing the analog clock and power monitors, replacing them with a military time clock and space monitors for my individual hard drives.

Rainmeter MaxoWeather Config

This config, which was included in the Enigma desktop, pulls forecast data from Weather.com. Simple enough.

CD Art Display

This probably took the most work - producing this nearly fully custom skin for CD Art Display (CAD) basically boiled down to me hacking apart Nevezen's elegant Pure Adium skin. Kaelri had provided a style of Pure Adium to go with Enigma, but it didn't really fit for me. The documentation for CAD skinning isn't great so I had to figure things out on my own... anyways, once I create my own graphics, this skin will be officially all new and all mine.

As you can tell, I extended the play bar, moved the text around and made everything larger. The buttons seen now are in reality hidden; they are shown when you hover over the album art briefly. I don't know how to change the area that causes the buttons to show, but I like this setup anyway.

Background

The background is called "Rubik" and may be found at http://interfacelift.com/wallpaper_beta/details/1301/rubik.html.

Conclusion
So, that's my desktop! If you want any of this - the CAD skin, the Rainmeter configs - let me know and I will post download links to them here. I'm not quite comfortable posting the CAD skin for download with some elements from another author in them yet so I will have to create my own button graphics before I make it public.