My Windows 7 Theme Pack
I've been running the Windows 7 beta for awhile now, and I'm in love! If you're relatively technical and want to take the new OS for a spin, the good news is that we've extended the beta download period until February 10, 2009. Once you have it installed, it's worth reading Tim Sneath's fantastic list of 30 Windows 7 secrets. I'm running Windows 7 on my Dell XPS desktop machine at home and on my Dell laptop at work. Even with the beta version, everything runs very smoothly and I feel a lot more productive. Plus, it's just a joy to use.
Windows 7 introduces theme packs, which are .cab files that contain all of the necessary assets to implement a theme, including sound files and images. You can find a bunch of theme packs on the Windows 7 site, and Paul Thurrott covers the basics and includes his own theme packs in his article, Windows 7 Feature Focus: Styles and Desktop Slide Shows.
As an experiment, I've created a theme pack based on my wallpaper images. It contains 20 hand-picked, nature-themed macro photos that I've taken over the years. The desktop images are configured to shuffle randomly every 30 minutes. Otherwise, the theme uses the default Windows 7 color and sound schemes.
As always, comments and feedback are welcome. Drop me a note if you decide to create your own.
