Insight into the mind of a redneck from Dunbarton, New Hampshire
Voyages with "Dock" Costeau Skin Explorer
Published on February 4, 2005 By Essencay In OS Customization
Welcome fellow explorers. Today we search for one of the most fundamental concepts of man....Time. Man has been measuring time since the beginning of recorded civilzation. Today we have a wide array of ways to display time on our desktops.

The most basic expression of time
that you can display on your desktop.


Taskbar skinned by SkinPlant 2005
The taskbar clock...
Of course you could always expand your  
taskbar and get more information, but
that just wastes a lot of screen space.


Taskbar skinned by SkinPlant 2005
with day and date.

Since we live and breathe desktop customization, many of us can hardly do with just the simple taskbar clock that comes with Microsoft Windows. In fact some of us won't even allow the Windows taskbar to grace our desktops. So we need an alternative. Something functional with a little eye-candy appeal. So today we'll explore one option of many that are available to you.

Beatnik has been around desktop customization longer than me, so I don't know a lot of the history. What I do know is that it is a neat little freeware program that puts a clock right on your desktop. It's very skinnable and supports atomic clock synchronization (fancy techie talk for...it gets it time off the net so it's accurate). Beatnik is available for download from Something Decent (SomeDec) and there is a Beatnik Library for it here at Wincustomize. Here are some great looking skins for it.


NucleoX by Agneva
 
Metalic Blue Right
by Iridsiana
 
BeOS 2K5 by Snowman


As mentioned at the beginning of this article, this is only one option available of many. There are also clock widgets from DesktopX and from Konfabulator. Plus a couple of other lesser know utlities. We'll take a look at some of those next time we voyage out. Signing off for now. I'm "Dock" Cousteau, Skin Explorer.

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