14 DAY TRIAL // The moment you start working with the same computer for many hours a day you definitely want to personalize it. The least you can do in this sense is change the desktop background picture or the screensaver. Many users go deeper with personalization and make more functional changes like hiding the arrows on desktop shortcuts, creating hotkeys for launching different applications faster, stop various services for increased performance, tweak startup etc.
A shallow customization of the computer includes changing its looks by replacing the shell. Out of the various solutions on the market some of them are really worth your while. Vistamizer and Vista Transformation Pack are good shell replacements for making your old XP look like a brand new Vista. If you are willing to shell out some money ($19.95) in order to fix your desktop with a complete change of look and feel of Windows interface, Stardock's WindowBlinds would be a healthy solution for your computer.
But these are not the only alternatives on the Internet and many more are just waiting to be installed. Here's another one: Desktop3D from Yokersoftware. The app is tailored to replace the standard Windows Desktop and bring new features. It allows transforming the dull static desktop by bringing a completely new animated world in front of your eyes.
The program is not free and can be acquired for $19.95. Of course, you benefit from a trial period of ten days, with absolutely no restriction imposed on the use. The only issue will be the trial version reminding screen that pops up after any change you make.
Immediately after installation, Desktop3D brings to front a brief tutorial presenting a short introduction on how to use the application. You'll learn the way to create desktop shortcuts (drag and drop is sufficient), changing original desktop icons with new, amazing ones (the list contains shortcuts for the most popular applications: web browsers, P2P clients, email clients, media players, image editors etc.), remove icon labels, or change the skin.
As in this case the skins are the interface of the entire application and there are no settings or configuration to be made, visual impact is its strength. But no matter how good they look we cannot overlook the fact that there are too few of them. The three skins available include a beautiful blue sea representation, a fire and a nice looking rainy autumn day. All three of them are animated and will definitely give a twist to your desktop.
It seems that the developer will enrich the application with more skins as right clicking an empty place on the desktop, under Skins menu there is "Get more skins" option which should open a web page full of alternatives. However, during our testing, the page could not be opened and the website also presented dead links to certain areas.
All the settings supported by the application are one click away. Thus, accessing the context menu from an empty space of the desktop will let you change the skin, lock the position of the icons, hide them all, and define which system icons should be displayed.
A right click on one of the icons/shortcuts will open up a different shell menu providing options for renaming, editing, choosing the application to open the file, show/hide labels, change the icon, set its size and acess the Properties of the file. On the downside, this menu is not contextual as the same options are available regardless of the item it is accessed from. Thus you can try opening Internet Explorer with one of the installed softwares (and the command will be executed).
However, this action is not advisable. We experimented this option and tried to open IE with Adobe Reader. The result was that almost all installed softwares would try to open with Adobe Reader and borrowed its icon because Open With dialog had "Always use the selected program to open this kind of file" option checked by default and there was no way to uncheck it. The problem was easily fixed by uninstalling Adobe Reader.
Choosing Edit option for other files than images results in absolutely no action. When applied to pictures they'll be automatically opened in MS Paint and there is no options to change this.
Further testing of the application resulted in more pitfalls as your desktop's functionality is seriously crippled. There is no access to Windows Personalization options in Vista or creating a new folder/document/shortcut/etc. and multiple selection of the icons for arranging them on the desktop is not supported. Also, if you have an antivirus which integrates in Windows Explorer this cannot be activated for scanning a file with Desktop3D activated.
The bottom line is that for now all the application can offer is a set of three animated skins and over 100 extraordinarily drawn icons for replacing the originals of the installed programs. Other than this it will limit your regular desktop's functionality and, above all, it will not replace Windows Taskbar the result being a blatant discordance between the two.
The Good
The set of icons to replace those of installed softwares are definitely the best part of the application. It is easy to install and the three animated skins available for now are an interesting approach for the desktop.
The Bad
Desktop3D is incomplete. There are many issues to be fixed, especially right click menu which is not at all contextual and can cause problems if users do not pay attention.
The Truth
Once installed, carefully choose your options. Not all of them will work when applied to certain types of applications, as the software is not yet 100% complete. During our testing, it never crashed which is a good thing, but there are still big issues with integrating Windows shell options into it. It is not a full 3D experience, yet.
Here are some snapshots of the application in action:
