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Category: Applications | Tags: desktop | Views: 3 | Download Error Report |

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Code:
http://rapidshare.com/files/128427940/360Desktop_SP.rar

Despite my reservations about "needless" desktop enhancements, Image

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Intrigued me with its promises of "unlimited desktop space" and the ability to save any part of the Web directly to my desktop. After creating a System Restore point in case my Windows XP machine exploded, I tentatively gave 360desktop a spin.


Surprisingly, 360desktop did better than my (rather low) expectations and delivered a smoother, cleaner product than I expected.


The short of it is that 360desktop turns out to be darn fun


It's the sort of cool visual application that will amaze easily impressed coworkers and family members. Whether it's worth the resource consumption likely depends on how much you like to play with your desktop.


Installing and running 360desktop is simple, although it does place a shortcut on your regular Windows desktop without asking. It runs like any of your other Windows programs and doesn't seem to affect any critical system files.


All in all, 360desktop is a high-octance Windows shell manager. When you run it, you get a 360-degree panoramic desktop with custom widgets. When you quit 360desktop, you're back to your standard Windows desktop look and feel.



After you've transformed your desktop into a 360-degree panorama, a persistent "QuickNav" area in the upper right of your screen lets you scroll or drag your mouse to move around. You can also push your mouse to the left or right of your current screen to make it scroll. The included help-guide PDF file suggests that you can navigate with the Windows button plus the arrow keys, but that feature did not work for me.

A handy icon in the Windows taskbar offers a right-clickable context menu that lets you customize a variety of 360desktop options, such as scrolling speed, whether or not the app starts with Windows, how it focuses Windowed applications, and whether the location of running apps and widgets appear in the QuickNav.


Putting Web widgets on your 360-degree desktop is simple, and the feature works well.



Click the "Add a widget" button in the QuickNav, and you'll see a bare-bones dialog with two tabs--Web Widget or Embed Code Widget. The first lets you enter a widget name and a URL; the seconds lets you enter a name and a snippet of HTML code.



Once you've added a widget, a special 360desktop toolbar appears next to it. That toolbar lets you drag and drop the widget, close the widget, or click the "i" button for more information. I easily added widgets from a variety of sources, including full Web pages from CNET Reviews, videos from YouTube, and music playlists from Last.FM, imeem, and FineTune.




The additional button in the 360desktop widget toolbar is the killer feature for me.


I used it whenever I wanted to save only part of a Web page. To save a manually resized portion of a Web page, first click the Widget icon in the QuickNav to add a new widget, then click the Web Widget tab. Your most recent Web page is entered by default, or you can paste any URL you'd like. Once you've saved the Web page to the desktop, a double-arrow button in the lower-right corner lets you resize the widget as you like. Clicking the Scissors "clips" the page, then you drag the widget to the location you want it, then click off onto the desktop. Voila.



360desktop installs with a U.S.-based Fourth of July theme (the public beta was announced on 7/4/08), and it also includes "Smokin," a panoramic image with five artistically colored smoke trails.


Available for Wndows XP and Vista, 360desktop is unfortunately not compatible with the 64-bit version of Windows Vista.
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