notes from underground

So, instead of work, I’ve been making Windows pretty. For some reason I googled “how to make windows look like osx” in writing lab two weeks ago, and although that was not my end goal it lead me to http://stardock.com/, most importantly the programs called ObjectDock and
Logon Studio, both available for free download and unlimited use (although I believe both come in a for $$ version as well, including much more with the features).

Armed with these tools, I set out to make something of my desktop. A little tweaking and some winamp skins later, my desktop looks like this:

The background I got from Chip, simply moving elements around and upping contrast. The bar at the top, that looks like the Mac OSX style Dock, is the ObjectDock program previously mentioned. The record that says Samurai Champloo is a Modern style Winamp skin available through Winamp’s Skin Browser. All in all I like the way it turned out… running trillian with 80% or 90% transparency is another fun thing to do sometimes for eye-candy. That was all really easy to do, in the end… the hard part was the next bit.

A little earlier I mentioned that other StarDock program, Logon Studio. When I first downloaded it I tried a few of the preinstalled themes, and realized shortly that they all looked like crap on widescreen displays. A little while later, Tuesday night to be exact, I stayed up a little late to finish a paper for History of Japan. I’d been listening to the Samurai Champloo soundtrack the whole time I worked, so when I finished my paper still full of energy, I decided to take a shot at maybe making a “samuraiPod” style logon screen too. I began wandering around Google Images, looking for good starting points, but really didn’t find what I wanted, so instead I took a 5-minute detour and downloaded that Winamp skin. That done, I still had nothing but the default login screen for Windows, and that was too boring to ignore… Rather than, say, sleeping, I spent another few hours learning how the program worked and thinking about ideas for a logon screen. For some reason I ended up in an FF7 Concept Art gallery, and I downloaded a high-res desktop of Red XIII. I had a cool idea looking at the picture, so I brought it into IrfanView to play with the contrast and saturation, then brought it into Photoshop for layout and stuff. An hour and a half later I had added the shadow to the image (it was on a white background, no shadow before) and dropped in a generic gradient background behind it. I tried bringing that into Logon Studio, but I realized I still didn’t know how the program worked well enough. Just having the image was good enough for a tired Wednesday morning, so I went to bed and decided to put off finishing the project for the next long block of free time I ran into.

Tonight, in other words.

Although I’d been planning on finishing my Flash tutorials tonight, I took a break to try and work some more on this project. I began re-working the static elements of the design, but I was having layout issues… Lincoln suggested I try taking a screen capture of the login screen itself, then adjust in Photoshop. To my surprise, you CAN take screencaps without being logged in, and that gave me the material I needed to finish THIS:

So, yeah. I like it. Comments?