360 Desktop - Virtual Desktop Manager

Posted on July 11, 2008 at 5:15 am

Virtual desktops… if you’ve ever found the desktop clutter a frustrating part of using Windows and Linux isn’t an option for you, then frankly there aren’t too many solutions.

I’ve tried a few multiple desktop managers and none seem to be particularly great, although I’m sure a few of you will differ in opinion.

360 Desktop is a great new freeware application which takes your standard, flat desktop and turns it into a rich, 360 degree panoramic workspace.

“See something you like online? Clip it and put it right where you need it: take part of any webpage or your favorite web widgets, RSS feeds, videos and more, and turn them into widgets for your desktop.”

There are so many things great about 360 Desktop, for example if you’ve always preferred a clean desktop, but end up constantly filling it with icons due to the ease and accessibility, now you can have stacks of icons, but easily hide them just off screen.

Scrolling the mouse wheel is what rotates the wallpaper around, although you can also use the toggle button you can see in the top right hand corner of the screenshot below.

This is a beta release, but the developers have taken the unusual step of waiting until they had a stable product before releasing it for public testing. I was really expecting to be testing a buggy, resources intensive beta application, but instead it’s very impressive.

Memory usage is low, it’s very stable and while it’s not bug-free, it’s certainly good enough to keep running beyond initial tests. In fact even having it start-up automatically when you log on was surprisingly fast.

The worst thing about 360 Desktop was the two panoramic desktops that where included with the installation, I thought they where horrible and instantly went looking for some nice landscape scenes. Luckily three additional desktops are available from the official website which are a lot nicer.

360desktop™ is the convergence of the web and the desktop. If you “get” what they mean by Web 2.0, you can think of us as Desktop 2.0.

Somehow, aspiring to be the “web 2.0” of desktop may not be the best way to sell yourself considering the difficulty online services have had in monetizing their product.

The idea is to create web mashups using the companies widget software and potentially encouraging businesses to use the technology to create interactive ways of selling and advertising products.

I somehow doubt this, in fact I think it’s time to think beyond the whole, this is a great idea, lets monetize it with advertising!

Ah well, the product is sound in itself and it can be quite fun to try out, so go ahead and download it from 360 desktop.

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