Change Size & Position Of Windows 8 Start Screen

Windows 8 has entered its fifth triumphant month since general availability, and a lot of developers have already built an umpteen number of Start Screen tools to let you customize this latest Windows feature to your heart’s content. One such example is ImmersiveTaille that lets you customize the Start Screen in a few different ways. This portable application is basically designed to change the size of the Start Screen, and move it to to user-defined positions on the screen i.e. top, bottom, left or right. Its works in pretty much similar fashion to our previously covered Start Screen Modifier from WinAero. For instance, it enables you to specify a custom Start Screen resolution, or display it along with the Taskbar when in Full screen. More details after the jump!

ImmersiveTaiile sports a rather simple UI, and displays some fancy animations upon user interaction with the app. Furthermore, it’s a multilingual application, with support for English, French, Spanish, Chinese, Dutch and German. To change the application language – which is set to French by default – simply click the flag button at the bottom-left corner of the window. ImmersiveTaille’s features are accessible through the three tabs at the top-right: Basic, Advanced and Settings.

The Basic tab allows to select your preferred position for displaying the Start Screen from a list of options. The drop-down menu at the center contains options for switching among Top, Bottom, Left, Right and Fullscreen + Taskbar modes. The changes are instantly applied, meaning there’s no ‘wait before changes are applied’ notification or system restart required for switching to a different Start Screen location.

The Advanced tab/button houses further options to customize the Start Screen experience. You can change the position precisely by specifying custom X and Y co-ordinates for it, while also enabling you to rescale it by by specifying custom width and height dimensions for it; all you have to do is input your desired values and hit Load.

Moving to the Settings tab, the application allows to change a few behavioral parameters of ImmersiveTaille here. Apart from the generic ‘Start with Windows’ and ‘Windows notification area’ options – the latter of which lets you enable the app’s system tray icon – ‘Automatic shutdown’ lets you select a shutdown timer for the app when minimized to system tray. I couldn’t figure out what ‘Normal after having to leave Start’ and ‘See startscreen Software Startup’ toggles really do; this text can certainly do with some rephrasing or a better translation to English.

ImmersiveTaille is an open-source application that works only on Windows 8. Testing of the app was carried out on Windows 8 Pro, 64-bit.

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Lightweight Photo Editor With Effects, Facebook Integration & More

Every once in a while, a new photo editor tosses its hat in the ring to grab users’ attention (and money too, at times), promising something unique or phenomenal. While the choices available in this department are apparently endless, only a few photo editors offer powerful editing options that instantly make them worthy of  a shot. Developed by Micranes Incorporated, PhotoSun 14 is a new Photo Editor for Windows that’s jam-packed with features, doesn’t hog your system’s performance, and does exactly what’s it advertised for without adding a plethora of other features you might not likely need.The application’s light-grey interface seems to be inspired from Adobe’s Photoshop. The toolbar at the top provides everything you’ll need to fix or annotate your photos with a few simple clicks. It contains a few basic editing options that we tend to see in other similar apps, such as image rotation, resizing, red eye removal, adjustments and effects. You can also view a slideshow, print your photos, mail them to others or share them over Facebook.

The Adjust feature lets you tinker with various color parameters of your images like temperature, tint, exposure, contrast, brightness, saturation, sharpness and so forth. Image adjustments are applied in real-time, meaning you instantly see the exact output of your image without the need to apply them first each time.

You can also spice up your photos by adding various post-processing filters to them. These come in three categories – Standard, Frames and Collage. The standard effects include black & white, matte, vignette, antique and sepia, among others. The Frames section lets you overlay a frame on your photos from the several available choices, while the Collage section offers you a bunch of collage layouts for your images.

Another cool feature of PhotoSun 14 the way it lets you add slideshow effects to your favorite photos. You can choose a slideshow theme from the several options available, and also select the background music to play with the slideshow.

Next comes the feature that every single photo editor should have – metadata editing. The Metadata button in the left pane brings up the metadata information for the currently loaded image, complete with camera make and model, flash model, lens model, camera serial number, date, rating, tags, image dimensions, ISO Speed, f-number, focal length, exposure time, aperture size and a lot more. That’s not all – you can click the ‘All MetaData’ button at the bottom to view even more detailed information. When it comes to the editable fields, you can simply change them according to your liking and hit the Save button to apply your changes.

If your image also contains geotagging info, you can click the ‘GPS Info’ button to check for its pertaining geotag, and even navigate  to the location in an integrated Google Maps view.

Another nifty feature that caught our attention is Facebook integration, which allows you to quickly upload and share your edited images on your Facebook timeline. You can upload the image as your profile picture, post it directly to your Wall, or add it to a new or existing Facebook album. In addition, comments left by your friends can be viewed from within PhotoSun 14.

To sum it up, PhotoSun 14 is a powerful and user-friendly photo editor that doesn’t aim to offer everything but the kitchen sink, but does offer enough features to make it handy in day-to-day image editing for most of us. It works on Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8.

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25 Best Windows 8 Themes & Visual Styles | Hacking Is Magic

Anyone would get bored looking at the same computer screen day after day. Changing the look of your system with new wallpapers and themes every now and then makes it feel fresh. Applying new themes isn’t all that hard; it’s looking for the perfect theme that takes a fare bit of time. Back in 2009, we compiled a list of great themes for Windows 7, and now, after a long time, we have put together for you a collection of awesome Windows 8 themes. While the themes remain roughly the same, a major (and much needed) addition in Windows 8 personalization now allows you to apply a different wallpaper to the each display in a dual-monitor setup. In what follows, you’ll find some of the best themes from deviantArt and Windows’ own downloads page, plus a little surprise for our dual-monitor users.

Windows 8 doesn’t allow you to add custom or third-party themes by default without modifying or patching three system files; themeui.dll, Uxlnit.dll and uxtheme.dll. You needn’t fret though, as you can easily patch these files via UltraUxThemePatcher. Simply download the application and then follow some simple on screen instructions to install it. The files will be automatically replaced during the installation, though you will have to restart your PC for the changes to take effect.

Now, you can simply download any of the themes included below and copy the .theme file and its pertaining folder to:

C:\Windows\Resources\Themes

third-party themes & visual styles

If you want to give your desktop a complete makeover, then what you want is a full skin or visual style, which replaces system files to provide you with deep customization instead of merely changing the wallpaper. deviantArt is probably the best place to look for such themes, but it’s a huge community with a lot to offer. So, to spare you the hassle of having to browse through countless search results and portfolios, we’ve picked out some of the best themes from there.

Aero By Design (by ~LiveOrDieTM)

Ourea (by ~neiio)

Areao4.8 (by ~neiio)

Platinum (by ~ZEUSosX)

Alduin (by ~charleston2378)

Work for Windows 8 (by ~neiio)

Dark 8 (by ~Gr8StyleX)

Dumbass V8 (by ~neiio)

Gray 8 (by ~gsw953onDA)

Incomplete VS (by ~sinopt)

Night Smooth (by ~neiio)

Space Blueberries (by ~neiio)

TwentyThirteen (by ~Sand-And-Mercury)

windows themes

If you are not a fan of customizing every UI element and just want a pack of some cool looking wallpapers, you might be interested in the themes on offer on the official Windows website. Below are our favorite themes from the collection.

Spectacular Skies

Captured Moments

Limited Edition Artist Series

Space

Illusions

Bubbles

Surreal Territory

Cobblestones and Corridors

AddictiveTips Windows 8 Metro Walls Theme [Watermark-free version]

panoramic themes (for dual-monitor setups) 

Panoramic themes are a little different from the regular ones in terms of how they are displayed on your screen. In a dual monitor setup, instead of displaying the same wallpaper on both screens or a different one on each screen, a panoramic wallpaper extends across both monitors if they have the same resolution.

Bridges Panoramic

Cityscapes Panoramic

Forests Panoramic

That’s it for our Windows 8 themes compilation. Make sure to comment about the ones you liked best and feel free to share great themes that you think we’ve missed!

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Add Windows 8 Start Screen-Like Metro Tiles To Desktop Using XWidget | Hacking Is Magic

XWidget is quite a popular application that lets you add some extraordinarily beautiful widgets to your desktop screen, similar to Windows Vista’s gadgets. You can customize the widgets in a lot of ways. Although it includes some pre installed widgets out of the box, you can download and use a truckload of additional ones developed by XWidget’s user community. One such widget that I recently came across is Windows 8 Shor Cut Small by Ubeto. It lets you add Windows 8 Start Screen-like tiles to the Desktop, and can especially compliment your setup if you have followed our guide to give a Modern UI makeover to your Desktop.

To use this widget, you’ll require to be running XWidget first, so install it if you haven’t already done so. Launch XWidget and look for Windows 8 ShortCut Small under the featured category in XWidget Gallery. It should look similar to the one highlighted in the screenshot below. Once found, click its thumbnail and then hit the download button from the widget’s description page.

You can customize the widget in a lot of ways, such as changing the default icon, specifying custom shortcut for applications, system utilities and whatnot, and editing the shortcut’s title. By default, Windows 8 ShortCut Small only adds one widget to the screen, but more can be added from the widget’s right-click context menu.

To add a new widget, simply click ‘Start same widget’ in the context menu to duplicate the widget. To personalize the widget according to your preferences, click ‘Shortcut Settings’.

The Shortcut Settings window lets you change the shortcut icon by applying a custom PNG image. In addition, you can change the shortcut path to your preferred one, and set the Display name that appears when you hover the cursor over the tile.

So how do you customize the background color of the tile? There’s a fairly simple way for that too. Simply click the minuscule rotate button near the bottom-right corner of the tile, and it will flip over to reveal a color palette. This color palette contains seven different colors to choose from, including violet, indigo, blue, green, orange, red and purple.

You can also drag and drop a file, folder or application over the widget to assign the selected item as the shortcut path for that widget. This makes the process of specifying the shortcuts even simpler. Moreover, you can add as many widgets to the Desktop as you wish. Furthermore, the widget can be positioned anywhere on the screen.

You can find a lot of Windows 8 Metro-style image files at DeviantART to use as shortcut icons for all sorts of apps that you have installed.

Liked this widget? You may also want to try our previously covered HTC Home XWidget. XWidget works on Windows XP, Vista, 7 and 8.

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How to Reset Windows Login Password | Hacking Is Magic

Windows 8, akin to its predecessors and many other modern operating systems, lets you create password protected profiles to make it possible for multiple people to share the same PC while keeping each user’s settings intact. This is quite handy, but can become an issue if a user somehow forgets their password. And if they are the only user with full administrative access, they’re apparently left locked out of the system. Previously we covered a detailed guide on changing a forgotten Windows 8 password via the System Repair Disk, but if you’re looking for a dead simple solution to reset a lost password, give Lazesoft Recover My Password a shot. This freeware application is designed to reset password of any Windows operating system including Windows 8, 7, Vista and XP. More details after the jump.

Recover My Password can reset the password with the help of bootable media such as CD/DVD or USB Flash Drive, which can be easily created using the app itself. The app can also retrieve product keys from unbootable Windows Installations. Along with support for multiple versions of Windows, the application is designed to work with various types and configurations of disk drives as well, including IDE, SCSI, SATA, USB, SAS and RAID. When it comes to file systems, it supports FAT, FAT32 and NTFS. To get started, you’ll need another PC for downloading and installing the app in order to create the bootable disk.

The application sports a barebones design, but that’s exactly what makes it user-friendly even for novice users. Once downloaded and installed, click the ‘Burn Bootable CD/USB Disk Now!’ button to open the Media Builder window.

As mentioned earlier, the application gives you choice regarding the type of bootable media you may employ. You can also prepare a bootable ISO image that you can burn to a disk later. After select the appropriate from the available options and click the Commit button. In case of a USB flash drive, the utility will format any existing data on the disk, so make sure you backup any important content from the drive before proceeding.

After formatting the drive, Recover My Password automatically starts creating the Recovery disk for you. Once done, click the Finish button and unplug the USB device or remove the CD/DVD.

Now boot the machine requiring the password reset using the bootable CD/DVD/USB drive that you just created. Also, make sure you have enabled the option for booting from removable media in your motherboard’s BIOS settings. Once booted to the screen as demonstrated in the screenshot below, choose the first option and press Enter to continue.

Sit back and let the system load some required files that are necessary to complete the password reset operation.

Once you are presented with the main application window, click Next to continue.

In the next step, you need to choose your operating system from the dropdown menu. This comes useful in case you’re running a dual boot machine. Once selected, click Next.

Now you need to choose the user profile that needs a password reset. The password recovery wizard also shows you other relevant details regarding the selected user under Account Properties. Select the require user from the list, and click Next.

This in turn will bring you to the last step of the recovery wizard. Here, you just need to click the RESET/UNLOCK button at the center to reset the password – it’s simple as that! Now click finish and reboot your machine.

Congratulations! You’ve successfully unlocked a password-protected Windows account profile.

Lazesoft Recover My Password is free for personal use, while a commercial license will set you back US$17.95, US$79.49, or US$159.69 for Professional, Server, or Unlimited Edition respectively. Testing of the app was carried out on Windows 8 Pro, 64-bit.

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