Tired of your boring old, default desktop interface? Using Rainmeter too much of a hassle? ScreenStyler is for you.
What’s ScreenStyler?
ScreenStyler is a very simple desktop customizable tool that allows you to move away from Windows’, and Mac’s default interface. Although still in beta development, it already has quite a few ready to use widgets available for you to pick from. ScreenStyler builds off the Rainmeter program, they’re pretty much the same thing, but this one’s a tad bit simpler to use, and has less features.
How to get started
- Start by heading to this website.
- Click the Download BETA 0.2.3 button.
It should take you to a mediafire website. If for some reason it doesn’t, here’s the link.(Looks sketchy, but it’s safe!) - Click the blue download button.
- Open up the file.
- Go through the on screen installation process.
Using ScreenStyler
Upon opening the application you should be greeted with the following screen.
Read through the “Learn the Basics page”.
After you’re done, return to this page and click on “My First Style”
On the left, you have the menu of which all your customizable options are located.
From top to bottom,
Wallpaper options
Widgets
Icons
RocketDock
Steam Overlays
General Settings
Save Overlay
Export Style
Apply Overlay
Wallpaper
In wallpaper settings, you can set your wallpaper to any solid colours, any gradient( and its rotation), pick from a large variety of preset wallpapers from within the app, add a wallpaper of your own, and apply blur/hue/greyscale effects.
A demo feature currently, layered photos, consists of wallpapers that are made of 2 layers, meaning you can hide widgets behind a specific portion of the wallpaper.
Widgets
The widgets portion is a larger portion of the application. There are a few premade widgets for news, audio visualizers, multiple clocks, audio switcher, a powerbutton, browser searchbar, simple background boxes, a system resource monitor, and small text menus.
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These Widgets are normal widgets, meaning you can drag them around and place them anywhere you’d like. You can also change the background colour, font, transparency, and the colour of the widget itself.
Grid Widgets are widgets that are neatly arranged in a grid that you can size to your liking. These grid widgets are pretty much carbon copies of widgets on ios. These widgets are not as customizable as normal widgets. Grid widgets are customized as a whole, not the individual widgets. You can customize the base colour of the grid widgets, the general size, whether the corners should be square or round, and if labels are needed.
You can also create custom text widgets. Custom widgets can carry out a multitude of tasks that are preset within the application. Clicking the custom bar opens up an interface with lists of actions to choose from. You can choose what this widget says, the font colour, the font, it’s size, and it’s alignment relative to it’s widget box.
Icons
Icons are my favourite part of ScreenStyler. If you don’t use it for basic ios widgets, you use it for these. Icons are small widgets for specific apps and websites. You can’t customize the colours but there is an option to alter all the icons to fit a dark, or light theme, and for applications, to look like mac icons. You can however, choose if the icon will fit into an existing grid, to go to the RocketDock, or just simply lay anywhere.
You can create custom icons too, for your own tasks. Choose an image, set a name, set the action, choose where the icon will go and voila!
RocketDock
RocketDock is a MacOs taskbar-like overlay. Like mentioned previously in the icons section, you can add icons to the Dock to have them neatly organized. You can choose the colour of the dock, the size, position, and add separators between apps too.
Here’s a dock example. This dock is at the bottom of the screen, quite big, and includes a separator in between ebay and steam.
Steam Skins
Steam skins is eaxtly what it sounds like, a skin for steam. Quite barebones, and rather negligible. It just changes the look of the Steam border. It requires the installation of SteamCustomizer, a separate project.
A dead pool skin is applied here.
Settings
Last but not least, is the settings menu. The settings menu consists of quite a few things. First and foremost, you can see the effect that the program has on your computer. Applications like these are low resource applications as they are simply barebones images that link to applications. However if you are concerned about it’s effect, you can choose between the 6 different tiers that your computer may fall into and the tool will tell you the approximate performance hit.
Startup options such as opening Rainmeter (your widgets), and opening RocketDock also appear here.
The bulk of the settings menu is in your widget specific preferences. These preferences include widget size override(if widgets end up too small even on largest setting), aspect ratio for the overlay, screen corner roundness, your default windows taskbar position and layout, to hide desktop shortcuts or not, 12/24h time, date order, Celsius/Fahrenheit, latitude & longitude for weather, news provider, and finally your media player.
Metadata is simply the name and description of your overlay.
In the Misc section, you can find buttons to import and export .styler files. These functions are used if you want to use a overlay you found online, or share your overlay with others. There is also a reset style function to clear everything in your current overlay, and a clear app data button incase your overlay/app ever acts oddly.
Finishing up
After finishing designing your layout, simply hit the save button, and hit the green checkmark to apply your style!
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