Jimmy Wales is the founder of the WIkipedia - a fine site, however, his personal homepage isn’t. One word is in my mind. Why? Just another brief post, sorry.

You’ll be lucky to get any posts between Sunday and the following skiing as I’m going on a skiing holiday. Thanks.

I think in my past posts I’ll have mentioned that I like the Windows Classic theme and Start menu. Well, for ages, I’ve seen screenshots with these cool title bars. I’ve wondered how to do it - but never really look into it.

So, I was browsing Digg today, and came across this story. The software has loads of extra WinXP eye candy - and I was happy to leave Windows Classic for it.

It looks amazing. The most fantastic colour choices, rollovers and icons in the world. I’ve changed by desktops appearance for example. Increasing the size of my icons using this. The funny thing is most of the icons expanded losslessly - Windows Live Messenger 8 didn’t! To cut WLM some slack it’s in beta.

I think this software is really nifty.

So what is Google X?

Google X was a project released by Google Labs on March 15, 2005 and rescinded a day later. It consisted of the traditional Google search bar, but it was made to look like the Dock user interface feature of Apple’s Mac OS X operating system.

It’s believed by many it was brought down due to legal threats made by Apple. It’s a shame, it would’ve been a really good, new interface for Google. However, it never left Google Labs. I never say this while it was in the labs, however, I came across one of the many mirrors.

Since then, I began to host it myself. It is a customised version, with extra search options - including video and maps - and I also modified the mirror code to add a reflection through the new CANVAS HTML tag and JavaScript (will only work in opera 9 Beta, Firefox and Safari). You can view it here, I don’t serve any extra ads, try it.

I’m lucky enough to have got given to me a Windows Live Messenger 8 (MSN Messenger aka WLM).  I got it from SuperJustin.com.

The first thing you notice about Live Messenger is it’s new cosmetic look. The colours are easier to look at than they were in previous versions, and also, the nasty grey menus are hidden much better! Also, there’s new online/offline/away icons When you look a little further into Live Messenger, you discover many more features. The biggest one is pretty well hidden - an VoIP phone and better file-sharing utilities.

The VoIP phone isn’t very obvious to access. I only use MSN for real-life friends, and I don’t have any invites yet, so I haven’t been able to test many of the features such as the P2P yet, however, at first sight it looks pretty nifty. You can have shared folders in which you place files to share with a specific contact. This appears in My Computer.

The only things missing the Windows Live Messenger 8 are the mess.be patch and Messenger Plus! (which will be released for the newest version around the same time as the stable release of WLM) and mess.be patch.

Screenshots