Now that I've got a full-time work laptop and a second system to reformat every other day I finally have a reason to customize my desktop with some snazzy wallpapers, sound schemes, and icons. I like to keep my desktop lighthearted, so I tend to lean toward cartoony, fun elements.

All of these sets are totally free for personal use, so download away! If you know another great set, feel free to share your links in the comments!

Comic Tiger - Obviously Mac-themed, but the set works well on Windows desktops, too. Created by Fasticon, but no longer listed on their free downloads - fortunately InterfaceLIFT still has it.

Desktoon - I first came across Everaldo's icons when playing with some Linux live CDs several years ago. Desktoon is packed with 31 pieces of hand-drawn goodness. Available from Yellow Icon.

If you're running Windows and you like to use several apps and windows at once, but also frequently need to access files stored on your desktop, the developers of Desk Topmost feel your pain. Even keyboard shortcuts that get you to the desktop collapse what you're working on to the taskbar and make you dig it out again. Desk Topmost doesn't -- it just puts the desktop on top.

Floating the desktop on top of everything else gives you easy access to whatever icons you need there, while leaving your Windows in place. It's sort of like a different take on the Mac's Exposé feature. Just like Exposé, Desk Topmost is most effective if you assign a hotkey to it for easy opening. If you open it up and then realize you don't need anything from the desktop, you can just right-click to close. Desk Topmost is available for Windows XP, Vista and 7.

[via Lifehacker]

Changing a desktop image on a Mac is no big thing. You can open System Preferences from the Apple menu or the Applications directory, or you can go straight to the desktop prefpane by right-clicking on your desktop. Changing the picture you see when you log in should be just as easy, but it's not. If you want to learn the Terminal commands to do it, then more power to you. For the average user, there's Loginox.

Loginox is an app with a simple drag-and-drop interface for swapping out your login image. That's literally all it does, but that's definitely enough. The only way it could work better is if the developers rewrote it as a prefpane, or if Apple decided to incorporate it into the existing desktop/screensaver settings.

[via Lifehacker]

Desktop is a Firefox add-on that's based on the same concept as Speed Dial for the Opera web browser. Both tools let you create a series of thumbnail shortcuts for frequently visited web pages that will be available every time you open a new tab.

But what makes Desktop different is that you can change the look and feel of the new tab page by dragging, dropping, and resizing thumbnails. In fact, it makes blank Firefox tabs feel a lot like the Windows desktop, which is probably why it's called Desktop.

You can also add search widgets, and folders to your blank tab layout.

The plugin is listed as an experimental Firefox add-on, which means it hasn't been tested extensively. But it seemed fairly stable with Firefox 3.0.10. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to work with Firefox 3.5 Beta 4 yet.

One of the hottest Twitter clients on the iPhone just became one of the hottest Twitter clients on the desktop, with the official release of Tweetie for Mac. It's been a trending topic on Twitter all day, and reviews are positive so far. I predicted some of the app's features when the preview video came out a few days ago, but here's a rundown of what it can really do:

First, it supports multiple accounts. Tweetie lets you switch easily between several Twitter accounts via the sidebar or a hotkey. Direct messages are threaded, so you can open them as conversations to see who said what, instead of having to switch between your sent and received DMs on the web. You can also use Twitter Search from within the Tweetie app, and break off searches into a separate window to keep track of them.

The best part about Tweetie is that there's very little need to go to the Twitter web interface for anything: following and unfollowing, reading people's streams and user info, searching and posting, and even shortening URLs with the service of your choice are all included within the app itself.

TUAW has an in-depth look at the features.

Tweetie has taken the iPhone Twitter client market by storm, and anticipation for the desktop version has been building sometime. The developer, Atebits, is fueling the fire a little bit more with a preview video of Tweetie's new Mac version, which is due out on Monday, April 20.

The preview shows a UI with a toolbar down the side, and chat bubble styling for the main stream. Knowing the iPhone version of Tweetie, I'm guessing we'll see more than one style option for the desktop version. It looks like there's support for multiple accounts, and for zooming in on a single conversation thread. The search features everyone likes in Tweetie for iPhone seem to be here, too, but the direct message page is new: it can apparently be sorted by individual contacts. There's also a nice link-sharing feature that I'm sure a lot of people will make use of.

We'll report more on Tweetie when we get a chance to test it out, so watch this space.

Desktop clutter is a common problem, especially when your desktop is your default download folder. A new Mac app called Grape makes it all manageable, though. Grape is a great-looking desktop viewer that allows you to rearrange, resize, and zoom the icons on your desktop. You can also draw boxes to divide up your clutter, making it neat and even attractive.

Grape's big strength is the zoom function. What looks like a hopeless of icons stacked on top of one another might look a lot better when you zoom in tighter or zoom out more. There's also a stack function that will put things in order for you automatically. Grape previews your media, so the icons are mini versions of your movies, photos, text files, etc. If you enlarge them or zoom in enough, you basically get the Quick Look view. You can also drop things from the Finder onto the Grape icon, and they'll show up in Grape's "drop zone."

This was an app I didn't know I needed until I tried it out. Now I hope that Apple's next OS has a desktop design that functions the way Grape does.

BumpTop is a utility that replaces the standard Windows desktop with a 3D environment that looks and behaves much more like a real world desk. Instead of organizing your data into virtual folders you can place items on your desktop and drag, drop, and flip your way through navigation. You can copy itmes to a USB flash drive by tossing them onto icons, or print items by tossing their icons on top of the printer icon. BumpTop also lets you upload photos to Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter simply by throwing them at icons for those social networking services.

It's visually appealing, and some people may find BumpTop to provide an intuitive method for storing and interacting with information. But you know what? My real world desk is a mess. I'm not going to say I don't have more icons on my Windows desktop than I really need. But at least their neatly organized and alphabetized. I'm not sure I need a 3D desktop that mirrors the disarray of the desk that my computer is sitting on.

That said, BumpTop has some nifty features. You can thorw items into a pile instead of folders, flip through items, or pin items to the wall for later reference. If you want to make some items bigger than others so they're easier to find later, you can do that.

If you do want to give BumpTop a try, it's relatively light on system resources although it'll perform best on a system with dedicated graphics and 1GB of RAM. There are Free and Pro versions available. The free version includes limited support and lacks some o the features of the Pro version which costs $29. Right now BumpTop is available for Windows only, but Mac and Linux versions are in the works.

Sometimes it seems that we're so plugged in to Twitter here @downloadsquad -- rather, at Download Squad -- that we don't even know FriendFeed exists.

Not true! In fact, I noticed that FriendFeed just released an official desktop notifier, built on Adobe AIR. It's pretty rough so far, but a lot of users are commenting with feature requests and improvements.

The main issue people have with the notifier so far is that it's a bit overwhelming. Right now, it just displays a pop-up for every new item in your feed. Useful, sure, but that can be a lot of items. Without customization settings to narrow down what you're seeing -- or slim down the size of the pop-up -- it's very obtrusive.

You also have to click through to take certain actions (like responding to comments) in a browser window, even though it looks like you should be able to do it right in the notifier. Despite these little annoyances, the desktop notifier is a good first step, and seems likely to improve in the near future.

I'm always on the lookout for a good application to utilize the extra space on my widescreen monitor, and this morning I happened upon miniMIZE.

It's a free app for Windows that monitors the applications you launch. When you minimize a window, miniMIZE removes the button from your taskbar and creates a thumbnail. It's easy on system resources, only consuming about 7mb of memory.

Thumbnails can be dragged anywhere on your desktop, or you can let miniMIZE automatically line them up along any edge of your desktop. You can also choose to pin icons to the desktop or have them float on top of active windows.

Further tweaks include thumbnail size, opacity, customizable hotkeys, and application icon overlays. Any applications you don't want handled by miniMIZE can be added to an exclusions list - just drag the crosshairs onto the appropriate program.

It's similar to ThumbWin, which Brad wrote about last year, but the site and application are both English.

Note that miniMIZE will only catch things after it's running - so you'll have to close and re-open your other apps after installing it for things to take effect.

"Teach a man assembly, and he'll write device drivers for a day. Give a man a disassembler, and he'll figure out every secret hidden in the Windows 7 pre-beta."

I swear, I'm never going to get tired of posting about Rafael Rivera finding cool stuff hiding in the guts of our Microsoft products. He's done it yet again; this time, Rafael has uncovered another couple of Windows 7 shell goodies people have been asking to see for quite some time now. What's the latest discovery? Rafael is coining it "Desktop Slideshow;" it's a new setting hidden away in your Personalization settings that allows you to select multiple images to create a fading slideshow on your desktop.

"But wait," you're thinking, "I can a) do that on my Mac already and b) there are third-party utilities that let me do this on my Windows PC." That's true... but can your Mac or your third-party utilities automatically pull desktop wallpapers from an RSS feed? No? Well, Windows 7 can. Check out Rafael's blog Within Windows for more details, and a tool to let the masses check out the shiny new features once he's got the finer points worked out.

If you've got a mammoth widescreen monitor on your desk and you're a Windows user, you may be wondering what to do with all the extra real estate you've got. Why not use it to visually manage your running applications?

Microsoft Scalable Fabric takes your monitor periphery and turns it into a tumbnail gallery of your non-active windows. After installing the app (which requires the .Net 1.1 framework), the middle of your desktop becomes a hot zone. It's totally customizable, so you can stretch the boundary lines as far to the edges as you like to prevent accidental resizing.

Drag a window out of the zone, and it will shrink, getting smaller as you drag it farther away from the boundary line. Drag it back, and it returns to its restore size. It's even smart enough to remember the position you drag your windows to - click a taskbar button to minimize, and it'll shrink back to it's thumbnailed home.

Oh yeah, there's a little more eye candy inside: minimize and maximizing are animated, albeit somewhat poorly. It's a good way for anyone who heavily multitasks to keep their arsenal of applications at the ready.

It may seem illogical to tie Meebo to a desktop app, but that's exactly what's going on here. Meebone uses Adobe AIR to bring Meebo's services to your desktop through a dedicated app, but it's still in beta. So if you're down to try it, keep in mind that you'll probably encounter some problems... just like we did.

When attempting to login to AIM, Meebone was confused by a space in one of our user names. Other IM clients and services -- even Meebo itself -- aren't usually bothered by spaces. But that was our only major issue with the AIR-based app. And we're hoping it will be fixed before Meebone graduates from beta.

We tested the app with Google Talk and AIM accounts. Each logged-in successfully, brought up buddy lists, etc, etc. In other words, it introduced a basic Meebo set-up to our desktop, and we liked it. Just barely, but we did like it even though it sort of defeats the purpose of Meebo itself.

[via Adobe Air Marketplace]

Tired of looking at all 67 icons littering your Windows desktop? Sure, you could just clean them up and place just the shortcuts you use most often on your desktop. But Iconoid presents an easier alternative - hide your icons when you don't need them.

Iconoid is choc full of features. You can set it to always hide your desktop icons, never hide them, or hide them based on where your cursor is. You can also choose whether to hide or show the taskbar.

The program also lets you adjust how your icons are displayed. You can select background or text colors or adjust whether a drop shadow will be displayed. You can also save the position of the icons on your desktop so you can quickly restore your desktop settings even after you've moved icons around or changed your screen resolution.

[via Lifehacker and Life Rocks 2.0]

Facile is a Facebook desktop app for Mac, modestly described by the developer as "like Twitterrific for Facebook, but uglier." We don't think it's particularly ugly, actually, and it's a neat way to track friends' status updates. It even supports Growl notifications.

With Facebook Chat being integrated into more desktop apps, there seems to be a demand for access to Facebook features without the website (and the ads). Facile makes Facebook status updates more meaningful and useful, because you can get them as they happen. If apps like this are widely adopted, we'll definitely think of keeping our Facebook status more current. Heck, with Twitter's current API limitations, maybe we'll just feed our tweets into Facebook and let Facile do the work.