Smart Desktop Adds Important Shortcuts In Tabs On Your Desktop
Smart Desktop is a dynamic application to overhaul your desktop by replacing your desktop shortcuts with a feature rich overlay menus. It contains weather, calendar and system monitoring widgets, as well as time and date display. The system monitoring widget contains information regarding CPU and RAM utilization, Network traffic and used disk space. Numerous shortcuts within the Home tab are divided into convenient sub-tabs which allow easy access to browsers, MS Office programs, Google Search, Dictionary Search, media players, system utilities, Windows accessories, etc. Similarly, the Weblinks tab from the top of the interface provides quick access to commonly used search engine, social media, news and other related websites. Smart Desktop seems to be a viable replacement for the previously reviewed Rainmeter. Smart Desktop can not just be a good replacement for multiple application shortcuts on the desktop, but also a useful way of monitoring essential system components such as the CPU and memory utilization.
When Smart Desktop starts for the first time, you are prompted to enter a zip code of an area for receiving weather and time information. The Home tab displays a five day weather forecast, a calendar(with the current date highlighted in red color), RAM, CPU, power, hard disk and network monitors, as well as shortcuts to numerous applications and Windows utilities.
You can click on any of the tabs located within Home to access commonly used applications. For example, the System tab contains shortcuts to My Computer, Documents, Videos, Pictures, Windows Live Mail, Windows Live Writer, Movie Make and Photo Gallery. Similarly, the Design tab contains shortcuts to Flash Player, Adobe Reader and development related applications such as Photoshop, Dreamweaver and the like.
The Media Players and Internet tabs provide shortcuts to media players and browsers, respectively. The utilities tab provides access to Windows utilities such as disk defragmentation, system restore, as well as third party software shorcuts like CCleaner and the Nero suite.
The Microsoft Office tab comes handy for accessing MS Office applications instantly instead of adding individual shortcuts to your desktop. The Accessories tab contains shortcuts to Windows accessories such as Notepad, Paint, Wordpad, Command Prompt, Calculator and Run.
The Weblinks tab (from the top of the main interface) enables accessing websites related to commonly used search engines, social networking websites (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Orkut and LinkedIn), mail and blogging websites, music and video sites YouTube and Hulu, Art, desgin and community websites, as well as news and software related websites.
It is worth mentoring here that this application is still in development and therefore users may face some bugs. During testing we experienced some issues with the Videos and Wallpapers tabs which did not seem to respond. Moreover, you might have to run this application in Windows XP compatibility mode by selecting properties from right-click menu and choosing XP mode in the compatibility tab. Smart Desktop works on Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7.
