September 29th Skin Thoughts and Reviews

Monday, September 29, 2008 by wulfn1 | Discussion: Community

This week I thought I'd say good bye to summer, with one last fling.

So, before we start seeing oranges browns and skeletons, I thought I'd bring some summer color to the screen.

 

To begin with I chose a perfectly summery windowblind skin, in the form of Watermelon by Imzadi. This is a cutsie skin, without being sappy sweet. Refreshing, like a real watermelon. I enjoyed the way the programs menu and other submenus have a gradient shaded theme, starting with lightest up by accessories , and darkest at the end of the list.  The combination of reds and greens I thought were going to be too christmasy, but I was pleased to see they worked well together and didn't remind me of christmas at all.

click to open full size

 

I paired the blind with the wall Ocast by eamejia . The relic in the corner, and the summer wheat reminded me of the view out my window(yes complete with relic) in the mid summer here. I really love this wall and have used it several times in the past.

 

To compliment the blind, I chose Win3D Summer XP by JamesT. I know I had to travel a little in the way back machine , but it was worth it. This set's watermelon pink and green shaded icons play nicely with the watermelon/ summer theme of my grouping here. and it's a very extensive set I might add. The only thing I had to adjust was the firefox icon, which is the same one as last week, but recolored in icondeveloper to match the Iconpackage.

click to open full size

 

I moved my fences around a bit and reduced their size to show the desktop off to it's best advantage .

For the CursorFX theme, I used Buzz by PuterDudeJim. A bumble buzzing around my screen just seemed appropriate. I was surprised to see the cursor is actually a bee with the stinger as the pointer, as the screenshot suggested it was just a striped arrow. I like the bee better .

 

I decided not to go too elaborate this week for my DesktopX objects. So I just used a simple weather widget which does a lot more if fully opened. Combined II by Richard Mohler, is light, simple and contains a weather widget,calendar ,music player, color picker and mouse tracker all in one. It can be minimized to show weather only, or fully opened to totally enjoy all the features.

I decided to have a little fun with this one, and used Sun Clock by Jaramia. The clock fit nicely over the palest spot of the wall, where the sun was just barely shining through.

I added Mystic Stalk by tippytonail just because no true field is without one or two stalks of last season's crop here and there.

Lastly I found an older widget that really worked for me. It's probably going to be on my desktop often, so look for it and remember this link DesktopX Helper v2 by Randahl. I think it is prettier and less in your face than the dx helper that comes standard.

Well, That's it for this week's look. I guess it's time to put away the pretty greens and pinks and get ready for the fall lineup. Hope you all are ready, I know I'm not. I love summer but I will do my best to provide the look of the season!

Have a good one,

Wulf

scott57
Reply #1 Tuesday, September 30, 2008 10:40 AM
This WB is really great but I don't know how to resize the wallpaper that you used wondering if you could help? Email: hood57@gmail.com
wulfn1
Reply #2 Tuesday, September 30, 2008 10:52 AM

To be honest, I never thought of resizing it. I use windowblinds to set my wallpapers and there is a field in the config in the wallpapers section where I selected smart mode, or stretch, whichever one looks best for the particular wall.

Though if you have an editing program like paintshop pro , or one of the others you should be able to "resize" the image and save as. I have done that a few times with images that are too small. I am not great at doing this though and I bet there's an expert out there who can explain how best to  do it.

PuterDudeJim
Reply #3 Tuesday, September 30, 2008 2:10 PM
Looks great! And again, thanx for showcasing my cursor. So the preview is lacking...I will look into that, Thanx!   
PuterDudeJim
Reply #4 Tuesday, September 30, 2008 2:13 PM
This WB is really great but I don't know how to resize the wallpaper that you used wondering if you could help?
sargan, I use Photoshop and a plugin from AlienSkin called BlowUp. If you have these, resizing without distorting is easy. I will email you with further help, if needed.   
GigaByte69
Reply #5 Wednesday, October 1, 2008 12:39 PM
Hi Wulfn1 was wondering, what is the "Name" of this windowsblind(suite), i cannot find a link to download it anywhere in the writeup for it that is posted. Thanks GigaByte69
Imzadi
Reply #6 Sunday, October 5, 2008 11:14 PM
Hey Wulfn1, Just saw this and I think it's great you were able to use my skin in such an interesting way! Good job, it looks great!
wulfn1
Reply #7 Monday, October 6, 2008 7:00 AM

GigaByte69,

The link was in the first sentence of the review, I reposted it here for you.

https://www.wincustomize.com/skins.aspx?skinid=6626&libid=1

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