One thing that I really love about my personalized iGoogle homepage are the skins that Google has available. Google periodically adds new themes to their selection, but there’s only about ten of them that you can use right now.
That’s where the Custom Skins gadget comes into play. Users are able to create their own skins and submit them to a user-powered directory. To get the ball rolling lets add the gadget to your iGoogle page by clicking this button:
Now you can browse for new skins according to name, date, popularity, or by performing a search. What’s really cool is that you can assign “rules” so that different skins are displayed according to the rules that they match. For example, you can have it show a different skin according to the day of the week, time of day, weather, or even IP address.
The skin pictured above is the Firefox one, but the most impressive I would have to say is the Mac OS X skin. The Super Mario skin is rather cool as well. If you’re a sports fanatic you might want to perform a search for your favorite teams. For example, there are several skins available for football and baseball teams, such as the Chicago Cubs and Green Bay Packers.
Tip: If you peak into the settings of the Custom Skins module you’ll notice a “run in hidden mode” option. This can be used to completely hide the gadget, but you can always access it again by clicking the “Custom Skins” button located to the right of your tabs.
This is sweet!
I sort of like how the themes they have change colors, but I really like this Firefox one shown above.
I will be checking this out!
The Firefox one is actually pretty easy on the eyes. I was clicking around on the different themes, and when I came upon that one I thought it looked pretty slick.
iGoogle perso page is really handy. I like the tabs system, it allows to sort chosen gadgets by categories. I like a theme changing color following time of day (local or other set time, handy too). Works pretty like a portable toolbox that follows you everywhere.
The Google print.
I really like the Firefox one as well. My only problem is that I never actually use my iGoogle account, as nice as it may be. I just never think to go there to use it, even though it’s all set up and ready to use.
how to get this working as it say its off & can’t seem to find the on button or how to turn it on
Now obviously I’m biased as I wrote the thing so forgive me for posting.. try the “Feeling Lucky” skin – it gets a random image down from flickr. Change the skin to “Feeling Lucky” again and it will get a new image down
You can change id of the flickr group used to get photos via Edit Settings. Enjoy, people.
Just select one of the themes, and it will turn it on.
Ha, I didn’t realize what that was used for. Quite clever!
NetVibes is still better than iGoogle!