The Aero Clock is a lightweight standalone software for Windows that adds an analog clock to the desktop. The software is fully portable and can be started from from the location it is unzipped to.

It is by default always visible on the desktop. The always on top feature and other settings can be changed in the program options.

First thing that non-German speakers should do is to click on the Lng button to change the program interface language to English. The Second to modify the size of the clock, as most will probably dislike the large default size of 512 pixels in width.

Once they have done that they can play around with the transparency slider to modify the clocks visibility on the desktop, and the image texture pull down menu to switch the design of the clock. Available are seven designs in total, from the default Zitro design to silver, gold and stars.

Other settings include removing the second hand from the clock. It could be irritating to some users as it is always moving and visible all the time.

The position of the clock can be fixed so that it is no longer possible to drag and drop it to another location on the desktop. You can move the clock around otherwise by holding down the mouse button when it hovers over the clock and moving the clock around on the screen.

The two final preferences are to center the clock on the screen and to start the application with the Windows operating system.

Users who want an analog clock on their desktop should take a closer look at The Aero Clock. It is a free lightweight solution for all versions of Windows from Windows NT to the very latest Windows 7.

Why RGBA? If you are a fan of good old Transparency (like me) then you understand this is something Linux has needed for a long time. Yes it can sort of be done through Compiz with some tweaking…but not GTK+-wide. That’s what RGBA support is all about, allowing a themable transparency throughout the GTK+ widget set. The only problem I have found (outside of non-GTK+ apps not playing well with RGBA) is that certain features don’t want to accept the transparency as well as others. That and a need to give the desktop some finishing touches. And that is just what we are going to do here.

First things first

One of the things you are going to want to do, upon completion of adding RGBA support, is to install the Emerald decorator. Why would you want to do this? Because Emerald will give you the feeling of continuing that RGBA support into the window decorations, whereas the default decorator will not. I’ve covered Emerald before (see my article “Add Emerald for slick window decorations“) so installation shouldn’t be a problem. Once installed you want to use the right theme. For the Murrine themes I have found the Glassified Mac theme to work best. You can browse through the entire Emerald Themes page to find the one that matches your desktop perfectly.

One of the issues you might find is that you have to replace your window decorator every time you log out and log in. This can be a hassel. Instead open up the CompizConfig Settings Manager (click System > Preferences > Compiz Config Settings Manager), do a search for “decorations” (no quotes), select Window Decoration, and replace the command with /usr/bin/emerald. Now your default window decorator is Emerald.

The panel

Probably one of the biggest glitches is portions of the GNOME panel just don’t seem to want to work with RGBA. It took me a while but I figured out a “way” around it.

Figure 1

The biggest issue are the three main menus. No matter what you try you can not get them to work with the transparency. So what I found is to get rid of that applet (it’s actually one applet called Menu Bar) and replace it with the Main Menu Applet. Once you have done that you can then set the panel to transparent. You can’t set it to complete transparency, however, or you will have a bit of a disconnect with the notification area. There are still issues with some of the applets in the notification area…but they don’t stand out as much as the Menu Bar. Figure 1 shows the changes I have made. It’s not perfect, but it fits much better with the new desktop.

Figure 2

What does that new Main Menu applet look like when used with RGBA support? Take a look at Figure 2 for a sample.

Final thoughts

The addiction to eye candy is a rough one. You find yourself tweaking and tweaking until you think you can tweak nor more…until you find yet another tiny customization that looks better. The RGBA-enabled desktop is a fairly slick one. I hope you find it to be as eye-candy-tastic as I have.

We are going to remove the arrow of the shortcuts icons first. Hit Windows + R and type regedit. Navigate to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\LNKFILE and delete the entry IsShortcut in the left pane. Next do the same at HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\PIFFILE, et voila the arrow is gone.

Making the desktop icons transparent is far easier. We are going to use the freeware Iconoid to do this. Start Iconoid after installation and click on disable drop shadows in the color tab if that button is available. The default setting is that the icon background is transparent which is exactly what we want. You might need to change the default text color as well if you are using backgrounds that have a similar color than the default font color.

Vitrite is a 85K freeware that lets you change the transparency level of every windows application with ease. Start Vitrite, bring the window in front that you want to make transparent and hit CTRL + a number from 1-9 with 1 being 90% and 9 being 10%.