Aston Menu is normally about $20, but it's free for today only. It seems like the sort of thing this community would be into. It's basically a start menu replacement. You can skin your menu however you like, as well as add "widgets" to it, like weather, calendars or clocks (because no one ever really has enough clocks).
I haven't looked into it enough to know how easy making your own skins for it is, but at $0.00, you've got nothing to lose by trying it.
http://www.giveawayoftheday.com/aston-menu/
[EDIT]I gave it a whirl and it looks promising. The "All Programs" menu actually responds better than the default Windows one and it has some snazzy animations. The widgets are pretty cool, and it looks like most skins come with a "Search" widget, which is really handy on my XP laptop (search wasn't built into the start menu until Vista).
The included skins are a little bit too busy for my taste, but there's a whole gallery of skins on their site. Skins are all found in "%APPDATA%\Aston2\Skins\Menu" and are ".a2menu" files. It turns out these are really just renamed .zip files. Inside, the skins are all made up of .xml files and images. It's not as flexible as Rainmeter, so don't go looking to add every bit of information to your start menu. You mostly just change the looks and the placement. One cool thing about the skins is that they sometimes have variants that alter the colours and the placements of the widgets while maintaining the overall style.
It is currently April 19th, 2024, 9:56 am
Aston Menu free today
-
Alex2539
- Rainmeter Sage
- Posts: 642
- Joined: July 19th, 2009, 5:59 am
- Location: Montreal, QC, Canada
-
maminscris
- Posts: 509
- Joined: April 24th, 2009, 3:17 pm
- Location: Bucharest, Romania Lat 44,43° Lon 26,1°
Re: Aston Menu free today
thanks 
Zero at programing, zero at writing codes, so far 2 at making images
But I'm good at copy/paste, and I not always like this
But I'm good at copy/paste, and I not always like this
-
jsmorley
- Developer
- Posts: 22629
- Joined: April 19th, 2009, 11:02 pm
- Location: Fort Hunt, Virginia, USA
Re: Aston Menu free today
Do be aware of how "GiveAwayOfTheDay" works before you spend 8 hours customizing things using Aston Menu. You can get it for free today (May 3, 2010) only, and it must be installed today as well. Once installed it will run forever. However, if you have to redo your computer or need to reinstall the software for any reason you will have to buy it. It will not allow installation again after today.
Nothing wrong with this, and the site is a nice place to try out full versions of things, but go in with your eyes open.
Nothing wrong with this, and the site is a nice place to try out full versions of things, but go in with your eyes open.
