Many of you might have been bored by the same old desktop with the bunch of icons and a taskbar at the bottom. You might have used some windows gadgets but they don’t offer much in terms of UI and hence often prove to be a nuisance. But here’s is a simple tool to get something extra on your desktop and become more productive too!

Rainmeter is one such tool that transforms your desktop into a wall where you can arrange several tiny widgets. They work like  windows gadgets but offer a lot more in terms of productivity, design and are visually very appealing. To use the tool you first need to download the rainmeter software from their website. Then install and run the software.

If you install the latest version (2.3 beta) you will find that your desktop will look somewhat like this-

To remove the welcome screen just right click on it and click on unload skin at the bottom. The other tiles which appear like a sidebar  are all individual skins/widgets which can dragged around and unloaded. You can edit their visibility, lock their position, make them click-through, edit the skins etc. from the menu. You can add other rainmeter skins by installing them like executables and adding or removing skins from the menu like the current skins on the desktop.

With these skins you can keep track of time, get the latest feeds from your favourite blog, check the stocks, keep tabs on your system’s performance, get notifications of mails and lots more!

You can get some really great rainmeter skins from sites like customize.org, deviantart.com etc. If you haven’t tried already go to these sites and try out some really cool and productive stuff. My favourite are the WP7-based tiles skins which look great and offer a lot of options too!

Here are some samples from devaintart.com-