I love Christmas - it’s such a great time of year. It’s great to be back from University seeing family and friends. Everyone has finished work and school today for the festive weekend, and I’m ready to relax for a few days! I hope you all have a great Christmas period, and to celebrate I’ve linked up a few of my favourite Christmassy wallpapers for your desktop below:

Download at Deviant Art

Download at Deviant Art

There’s another couple too I still have from Christmas last year, which were offered by a site called Cubed Companies. They were great, but I can’t find them anywhere online this year. You can download them both in a zip below:

Download Zip

I take no credit for any of these - Just wanting to provide you with some great wallpapers to adorn your festive desktop!

Merry Christmas

As more and more screenshots and previews of the forthcoming Longhorn are released, I cannot help but wonder what has happened to it’s user interface. Windows XP always served me well. It was easy to find my way around, and everything seemed to be in the correct place. I came across the screenshot this morning, from the new Windows Explorer in Longhorn:

I can’t help feeling that somewhere down the line, the Microsoft interface design team lost their way. Let’s take it in stages:

Colour
There are so many different shades of blue and purple?! in that window that it looks disjointed and messy. They should definitely have stuck to the blue and green theme from Windows XP, which looked fairly acceptable (if a little garish).

Search Bar
Jacob Nielsen would have a field day. The text on that search bar is bearly readable, and mixing grey with a mauve colour is a bad combination. On top of that, they seem to have taken “inspiration” from the way Apple’s search works - neatly placed in the top right corner, with a magnifying glass…

What’s New?
I can’t help wondering, looking at the content of the screenshot, what new features have been added. It seems to me that Explorer has just been repackaged, the look and feel changed a little (for the worse) and a new “reference” column/attribute been added. How useful that will be to anyone will remain to be seen.

Don’t get me wrong - I know that there is a long time between now and the release date (a very long time), but I hope for everyone’s sake that they can come up with an interface which is more inginuitive than that one before it hits the streets.

Rarely, and I mean rarely, am I particularly impressed by an icon suite. Rad-E8’s previous offering was something to get excited about, and this release of the Elements Icon Suite follows hot in it’s footsteps. A great collection of Application, CD, Drive, Folder and Other Icons - all with a professional clarity about them.

They were provided as PNG and ICO formats, and have already been converted by Seph for the various Mac requirements. I’d recommend downloading them and giving them a go:

Download Windows (PNG) Versions

Download Mac Versions

A new version of AveDesk (read about it over at Aqua-Soft), created by the great AndreasV has been released. It allows you to do some amazing desktop skinning, and contains a huge range of features (including the new “Showcase”, which achieves a very similar thing to Apple’s Dashboard). It’s well worth giving a go, as it can really enhance your desktop.

Most of it’s features work with any PNG icon, so you have a huge range of customisability options with the program. Some of the things which could be achieved with the old version can be seen in a few of my screenshots. AveDesk 1.2 is just going to add even more functionality.

AveDesk 1.2 will enhance your desktop experience by making your desktop visually more pleasing and to give the possibility to add interactive icons and tools, called desklets.

The third release of this desktop enhancer tool focusses on a better user experience. With a new Installer, Theme-support, Tools and much more AveDesk 1.2 is a worthy successor of the 1.1 version.

Apparently, AveDesk is not freeware, but donation-ware. If you use AveDesk, please consider donating to keep its development alive. You can read more about it, or download it from here.

The Minium icon set is the latest release from Sascha Höhne, one of the greatest icon creators of the moment. He has fashioned several different icon packs, but this is his latest work which aims to replicate the metallic appearance of the Apple G5. I think they look great, and I’m impressed by the work he has managed to produce.

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Two new customising releases which I thought worthy of a mention today. The first is a superb icon set, by my all time favourite graphic designers, Enhanced Labs. You can download them in .ico format from here.

The second is a fairly nice looking new theme for ShapeShifter on the Mac. I found this theme via MacThemes.net, and you can download it from Dextop.