- Image via Wikipedia
Workers in an office like to place framed photos, knick-knacks and other small items on their desks to personalize them and make them feel friendlier. Before adding any items, the desk looks exactly like everybody else’s and can feel cold and unwelcoming–so the owner customizes it. The same holds true of the desktop on a person’s computer. It too looks exactly the same as everyone else’s when you first sit down to it.
Online colleges are a good source to teach you how to make your computer warm and welcoming, and ultimately to make it unique to you, to customize your digital desktop as well.
There are several ways to make the computer more friendly; operating system themes and skins, wallpapers, screensavers, fonts and icon sets can all be changed or modified to move the machine away from its factory default look. If you want to do more than just recolor things, though, you’re going to need some widgets.
A widget is a small floating interface that appears on your computer’s desktop and serves a specific function. What that function is varies greatly; there are widgets for everything from language phrase translation to jigsaw puzzles. You can even display a digital photo in a frame, just like you would place a framed photo on your actual work desk.
It’s easy to use a widget; simply download the supporting software program (usually made by the provider of the widgets you want, such as Yahoo! Widgets 4.0), download the widget you like (it will be a .widget format file), install it and run the program. The main widget software will load as a dock that contains thumbnails with your widgets inside; simply click the one you want, and voila–instantly, your desktop is less cold and more “you.”
There are thousands of widgets to choose from out there designed to do just about anything you could ask of a desktop gadget, so if your computer needs some spiffing up, check them out!
