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Today’s featured workspace uses the very material the workspace is made out of to create ambiance and a sense of space.

The simple components of Shibbopics’ home office are used to great effect. The surface of the frosted-glass desk is neat enough on its own, but with the addition of Ikea Dioder LED lights—also used in a previous workspace the Unidentified Floating Desk—the desk is transformed from a simple surface to a source of ambient light.
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Windows only: If you like mixing up your desktop wallpaper, but not enough to keep a dedicated application running and chewing up system resources, 100dof Wallpaper Rotator will shuffle your wallpaper at boot time. More »

Windows only: Ghoster darkens everything on the screen except the currently focused window, giving you a distraction-free environment to do your work.

Ghoster is similar to Adam’s Dropcloth or Isolator for Mac, but it also dims the taskbar—arguably the biggest source of distraction with it’s blinking buttons and system tray notifications. The application’s settings are stored in a text file, which makes it a little less user friendly when you want to adjust the settings. There’s also no hotkey to turn it on or off, but I’ve still found it invaluable for my concentration while working. To use, simply launch the application and start working. You can access the configuration file through the tray icon (changing the transparency number to a larger value darkens the screen).

Ghoster is free and open source, written in AutoHotkey. 

Linux only: The latest release of Google Gadgets for Linux offers speed and memory performance enhancements and a number of bug fixes, but, most importantly, support for newer gadgets like Gmail and Google Docs.

Those last two gadgets on Linux run almost exactly the same as the Google Desktop versions we previously mentioned, which could be all kinds of convenient for Linux users looking for the convenience of on-desktop email and writing without the heft of a full Google Desktop package. Hit the link below to grab a binary package or repository link for your distribution.

Canonical, the parent company behind the popular Ubuntu Linux system, wants to implement a new (and vaguely Mac-ish) method of user notification in Ubuntu’s next release.

You can check out a demonstration of the new notifications in action at Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth’s blog post. As noted by Ars, the goal is to provide a more user-friendly experience for anyone jumping onto Linux, and give the desktop’s pings and blips a uniform look and feel, as opposed to the multitude of notification apps and tools that use the free D-Bus protocol in a variety of ways. More »