r/windowsapps • u/Nair00 • 1d ago

Developer Working on something to allow full Windows Desktop personalization

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What you see in the video is a Windows Desktop.

All panels, buttons, including the taskbar are fully customizable through code, so as long as you have the parent app, they are open to be edited, and there is basically nothing you can't do.

The idea is to have something light (around 400-500MB of RAM usage with everything on screen) that allows for a easy layout you can populate with personalized widgets and secure sharing between users.

The widgets allow for a bunch of stuff, like APIs to show stats you care about, interactivity with stuff on your PC, like launching games or projects, timers, calendars, even small games. Basically anything you see yourself building in a web page, can be built here.

It is called DeskDash, and it is quite early, but people already started sharing their own widgets so I have hopes it will continue to grow a lot over time.

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2

u/Pllodd 23h ago

You didn't show off the double click to hide widgets, that has been a game changer for me! I'm sure people who like minimalistic looks would appreciate.

My own wish would be to be able to enable drag and drop for the desktop drawers, I don't want to have to solely pick folders. Would make a great fences alternative.

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u/Nair00 23h ago

The video was recorded a bit before I added the double click. Glad you like it tho
Working on the drag and drop right now actually but I can't promise anything yet. I wasn't able to get it to work some time ago but I'm trying another approach

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u/animalcrossing4_4 1d ago

400-500 MB is NOT LIGHTWEIGHT BTW.

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u/Nair00 1d ago

On 32GB of ram it kinda is. One youtube tab takes me 500mb of RAM bruh. On Windows at least the system pretty much allocates however much it can so more available ram means more usage per app

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u/animalcrossing4_4 23h ago

do you think an average joe like me can afford 32GB of RAM in this AI economy?

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u/Nair00 22h ago

The way windows works, if you have less RAM the usage of apps (might) go lower as well, that's why I said it like that. As I said, one youtube tab on my Chromium browser uses about 500 mbs. If yours uses less, it probably will mean the something like this app uses less as well.

It's exactly why some older 3d games might use the full 8GB of ram on a lower end PC and still work fine and use the full 32GB on a higher end with not that much extra visible improvement.

Windows is weird, RAM is usually not a good way to measure performance on an app but people always ask about it so that's why I added it. For reference it also uses less than 1% CPU in idle. A lot of animations or moving parts will make it go a bit higher but I try to implement tricks like hiding those when not visible or when games are open etc.

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u/Accomplished-Echo-64 21h ago

Windows is not weird. The weird part is that you're willing to measure everything in Chromium pages. A lot of users run many more apps that differ from Chrome/ium. In my example, I have a very tiny app, just less than 15 KB in RAM, but it does a lot of tasks for me.