My Current Desktop, Utilizing Active Desktop and the W3Background files I’m releasing below.

Active desktop was designed to deliver content to your desktop without having to visit your favorite websites to get the information. In many ways it could be seen as the precursor to today’s widgets. Active Desktop was first introduced in Internet Explorer 4.0, but became more widely know upon the release of Windows 98. It sounded like a promising technology it was buggy, and Windows 98 era PC’s really couldn’t afford the memory hit, so it never caught on. Nevertheless, Microsoft has included it in operating systems up to Windows XP, replacing it in Vista with Windows Sidebar. So what can we do with this old Windows 98 technology today? Create useful, time saving backgrounds!

I created this useful active desktop background out of necessity. I was constantly browsing to specific folders, but I don’t like cluttered desktops so I did not want to put shortcuts to them. Also, I wanted them only one click away, but did not want to over clutter my quick launch tray. My solution was an easy background that looks good and solves my problem.
I have included the Photoshop file so that you can modify it as you see fit. It is sized to my laptop screen resolution of 1680×1050, so it might take some tweaking for other resolutions. I made it simple to add a photo frame as shown on my background, in Photoshop simply drag your photo into the layer group entitled “Put Photos In Here”. I included a couple different background styles within the PSD, but I meant this release to be an exposure to what can be done with Active Desktop, rather than a design exhibition.

Click Here to Download (2.6mb)
Click Here for a live demo. Background image is full resolution (~1mb), be patient.

Quick Start
Extract Zip file to a place where it won’t be moved.
To get it to work for you, first modify the links in index.html to actual places on your computer and rename them accordingly.
Then, modify the CSS file to change the background or link colors/positioning if you wish.
In Windows, simply set index.html as your background.
If you have questions or comments, leave them below.