My ADD and OCD have a new friend...Follow

My co-worker has a little anime girl that sits on top of open windows. I think he likes anime a little too much if you know what I mean.

You goin' Kelvy on me proof?

those look like some nice tools. shame they are all copies of what Linux has been doing for close to 12+ years now with both Gnome and KDE desktop manages.

Object Dock

Also taking cues from the Mac OS, it turns the TaskBar on Windows in to a much cleaner and simple affair. Free btw.

I love it.

Edited, Fri Jan 6 15:48:41 2006 by kaeleshtheklingon

Not really correct. KDE and Gnome were first created in 1996 and 1997 respectively. I would have to assume that the full featureset of utilities didn't come right away either.

The WindowBlinds utility for windows was created in 1997. That's the actual application, not just the desktop environment that *might* have any given window application.

So, it's a bit incorrect to state that any of the various "neato" 3rd party windows tools were copied from 12 year old Linux ones. At worst, they came out about the same time.

However, that's just the "modern" ones. I recall tons of 3rd party applications for spiffing up your desktop for Windows going back to Windows3.0 (and probably older, but who really used it back then. ick!). While those aren't the same apps that are in use today, they clearly predate Linux itself, much less projects like Gnome and KDE (and yes. I know those aren't linux only projects, but they didn't come to full and general use until Linux came around).


If you want to get really technical, Sun's openwindows has had many of those features for much much longer. The perfmeter is a pretty standard unix application available on a number of OS and desktops. And probably a dozen other *nix flavors have had a number of customization tools (some inherent, some 3rd party) for several decades as well.


Just saying. If you're going to play the "that's not an original idea" game, then when it comes to graphical stuff on computers, you almost have to go back to about 10 minutes after Palo Alto labs developed their first X application (for the Xerox corporation), because I'm pretty sure that that's likely when the first "fun app" was written for a graphical computer interface. And if we're going to go back that far, then we can say that everything about Apple's and MS's OSes was stolen as well, not just the 3rd party apps...

yes, i was not extreemly clear. both kde and gnome are new to the xwindow world, just 2 of the more popular defaults atm in linux, but the xwindow project has been around since 1984. the tools for modifing the desktop have been a mainstay of just about every *nix desktop since then.

1984 makes it a bit older then my 12 years, but i kind of covered myself with the +.

you are 100% correct that kde and gnome are much newer then the 12+ years i stated.

i still think the tools that were linked by the OP are very kewl and give a lot more power to the EU to controll their desktop far beyound anything MS gives either by default or with extra fees.

I've seen this before, but was afraid to download it because I figured it would be full of spyware and crap. But I may take another look at it now.