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!

Conky is Growing!

I'm living proof that it does happen, kids! Because of the work I've done with Conky, I've been roped into the project to help those lovely chaps expand their web presence. We've just set up an Official Conky Blog, and the Official Conky Forums are on their way!

One of Conky's biggest strengths (besides being generally awesome, that is!) is its fantastic community of users, who keep pushing the boundaries of what you can do with this little program. Our aim is to bring everyone together and create a cross-platform community of support and inspiration! So if you are Conkily-inclined, do head on over. I'll keep you posted.

In the meantime, check out these awesome active threads for cutting-edge Conky technology:

• The Conky screenshot thread at ubuntuforums.org.
• The Conky help thread at the Crunchbang Forums.
• A similar thread on the Fedora Forums.
• ...at the Mint Forums.

...You get the picture. I found a forum thread for pretty much every distro I could think of (although I've only included the most recently active ones here).

Finally, one of the most exciting Conky websites out there:

• CONKY HARDCORE!

If the name wasn't enough to tempt you, then its extensive library of Conky tips and tricks surely will.