Apparently, my panel shadow = a desktop icon?!

So, I recently did a clean install of Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat. It went really smoothly, done and dusted in less than half an hour! As it turns out, I probably didn't have to do it...

One of the main reasons I decided to do a clean install was because no matter what I did, if I had desktop effects turned on, I couldn't get a drop shadow on my panel. I know, pretty obsessive-compulsive, that just the lack of a single drop-shadow would make me reinstall, but hey. You should know by now how desperately perfectionistic I am when it comes to my desktop!

Today, I learned that I probably didn't need to do it at all.

One of the first things I noticed about my new install was that icons showed up on my desktop when I mounted external drives. Since I usually have Conky sitting on my desktop, I don't like icons because they don't play nice with the Conky window. I know there's a way to turn off desktop icons with gconf-editor, but I couldn't remember what it was, and I couldn't be bothered to look it up, so laziness prompted me to install Ubuntu Tweak. I had Ubuntu Tweak on my last install and found it really helpful, so I figured there was probably a setting in there to turn off desktop icons. And I was right; in fact, "Desktop Icons" have their own shortcut! But look what happened when I went to turn them off:

Icons on

Icons off

For some insane reason, when I turn off desktop icons, my drop shadow disappears! Which begs the question: if I had tweaked that setting in my old install, would I have got my drop shadow back? And whose bug is this? Compiz? Gnome? Ubuntu?

So for the time being, icons are "turned on," but I've unticked all the options in Ubuntu Tweak, so it effectively doesn't show anything.  How this will interact with Conky, I don't know, since I haven't updated my Conky yet.  I will keep you updated...

Iconizer: Customise Icons Easily from a Huge Library (Cross-Platform)

Like the icons above? I made them myself! In under 30 seconds!

I stumbled upon a new website today, iconizer.net, and it's just what a lot of customisers have been looking for: a way to quickly choose and customise icons for downloading, with a huge library of source icons, from several different OSes and styles. Available styles include MacOSX, Vista, Aero and others.

Here's a quick guide to creating your own customised icons with iconizer.net:
Start by going to the home page. Actually, it's pretty straightforward, but I'll walk you through it anyway...
Select the category of icon from the left list; it will pop up a sub-menu of styles you have to choose from. For instance, here I've selected Applications -> Panther.

Once you've selected your category and style, click on the "Select Icon" drop-down box:
At this point, you will be presented with all the available icons for your category and style; simply click on the one you'd like to use.
On the next screen, you can choose what to customise:
You can choose which file format (from .jpeg, .png, .gif, .bmp, .ico), whether you keep the original colour or not, and if not, what to use as a foreground and background colour. You can also choose whether your background is transparent or not, and the size of the icon.

Finally, press "Generate Icon".
Your icon will appear on the top right of the page. For some reason, it doesn't turn up on the page correctly in my browser, but hey, it is beta, after all! However, despite not displaying on the page, it downloads just fine.

Et voila! You've got a lovely custom icon that you can use to populate a launcher/dock, or replace an entire icon theme (if you've got the time)!

Have you used iconizer to generate a custom icon? Want to share it? Post it here!

Desktop Customisation: A Double-Edged Sword

I can safely say that I am a desktop customisation addict.

The problem is, I'm not entirely sure that it's because I actually enjoy it, or whether it's because I am completely OCD and just perpetually in pursuit of pixel-perfection.

It's fair to say that one of the things I love most about working with Linux (and the open-source community in general) is the extent to which you can customise everything to your liking. And I do mean EVERYTHING. (I think my favourite obscure thing to customise has got to be the spacing between the menu and submenus in Openbox...Awesome!) HOWEVER, if you're a little perfectionistic like yours truly, it can also be the bane of your existence, because after a while, you start to notice every pixel out of place. Or how many times have you downloaded a new GTK theme, only to find that, for instance, the Google search box on your Firefox toolbar ends up being the wrong colour for some unknown reason?

The sad fact of it is that because Linux distributions are largely written and edited by the Linux community, many of whom do their coding in their spare time in front of the telly, there is rarely the attention to detail in GUI design as there is in a commercial OS like Mac OS or Windows. I hate to admit it, but while those desktop environments only give you a few choices of looks, overall, those choices are much cleaner and more complete. Linux distros tend to be easier to customise (in fact, they usually encourage it by installing several default themes), but the overall impact is weaker because they tend to be standalone themes, rather than part of a whole desktop "look". Add to this the awkwardness of GTK vs. Qt, incompatibilities with Firefox, quirks of various panels and window managers and, well, you can get a bit of a mess. So really, desktop customisation is a bit of a double-edged sword: whilst you can tweak your GUI to your heart's content, more often than not, I find that each tweak uncovers something else needing to be tweaked, and it quickly becomes a downward spiral...