15-Minute Reviews :: Aston v1.9.5 (Update)

Hello all and welcome to another 15-Minute Review! Today’s application is Aston version 1.9.5 by Gladiators Software – A replacement for your desktop interface.

This is an update to a previous review of an earlier version, Click to read Aston 1.9.2/1.9.3.1’s review.

Software Description

As Giveaway of the Day states:

“Aston Shell is a flexible and powerful Desktop replacement application, which lets you save your computer’s resources while giving your Desktop a unique look. Aston completely replaces your old Desktop with a new one, providing numerous additional features and saving computer resources for more necessary tasks.

By installing Aston, you acquire a lot more than just a fancy look, you get a more efficient way of using your computer. Aston looks similar to the Desktop you’re already familiar with, but its components offer much more functionality:”

Quick Pros

• Light on memory
• Themes & plug-ins extensive
• Looks great
• Runs very snappy
• Preview from the tasktray

Quick Cons

• No physical items on desktop
• Limited drag-n-drop support
• Very daunting and intimidating adding icons to any of the trays
• Does not retain icon position flipping back to Explorer

Expansion

Not much has really changed with this title since I reviewed it on March 1st, 2007. While the changelogs for 1.9.4 and 1.9.5 seem long, a lot of the changes appear to be bug fixes or rewrites of some code, with only a few smaller features showing up. You can review the changelog here.

First off, the biggest pro with this interface is that it is not as much of a memory pig as Explorer is. Right off of a boot, Aston sits at 8MB memory usage; This is far lighter than Explorer’s 11MB usage. Even when you bring up an Explorer window for file browsing, Aston only goes up to a bit over 15MB usage; As opposed to Explorer going to 23MB, this is a lot lighter. For systems with low memory, this could be an important savings, though doesn’t seem as drastic of a savings as with my previous review.

The next best feature of this application is its look and customizability. There are tons of user-built themes online with tutorials how to make your own online will allow you to give your desktop the look you want. The default theme looks really nice, but the best part is that you can expand and rebuild your interface how you like it. It is hard to go into detail of just how much can be done and has been done with this application. On top of themes for a look, there are a ton of plug-ins to extend the functionality of this title. Some of the top features right now on Aston’s website include a shiny resource monitor, a custom clock, WinAMP controller and much more. The application runs very quickly too; It all has a nice ‘snap’ to it, feeling like the interface is not slowing you down.

There are a lot of nice little hidden features all over the place too. In the Tasktray, you can see previews of windows in the tray my just mousing over even in Windows XP. There is the ability to drag and drop icons from an Explorer window to the desktop to create shortcuts. However, this does point at the first shortcoming of this desktop replacement; Objects don’t actually ‘exist’ on the desktop. They are simply elements that point to an item and can not be manipulated directly besides opening the file. This is a pretty big limitation of this application and would find this aspect hard to overcome; No quick text files for temporary data storage. No desktop file manipulation directly, no Explorer context menus. You are essentially limited to treating your desktop to one large shortcut collection.

The next major fault of this application is the limited support for drag and drop. Sure, you can drag from the Explorer to the desktop to make a shortcut; Drag and drop actual icons around the desktop to rearrange and into the recycle bin for removal, but there is much more that would make things simpler. You can not drag and drop into the trays in the interfaces, nor can you rearrange the start menu Program folders (or the trays) by dragging and dropping. The Quick Launch area has no drag-and-drop support either; Really, the support for drag and drop is minimal, and instead to manipulate these, you have to use the overly-complex element editor on each plug-in area. Granted the element editor offers a lot of power, it is also a lot of setup for just one icon being added or changed.

Another concern I do have is that there is no direct correlation between the icons in Explorer and in Aston; When you flip, your icons can be totally different between the two interfaces; Some may prefer this method, but to many it may be another awkward aspect to this application.

Final Verdict

I really do like the improved interface and the possibilities of the plug-ins as well as adding trays for helping with working, I do feel that my productivity (and any gain had by this interface) will be lost to maintaining the trays and trying to work around some of the other concerns above. This application is a matter of taste however, and some will find this application top-notch and significantly better than Windows Explorer’s offerings. For free, this application really has to be tried to see if it is powerful enough in your hands without giving you much hindrance by features we’ve come to take for granted from Explorer; I is a toss-up for me for my secondary system, but for my workstation, I’d much rather stick to Explorer. As for paying $49.95, this would be more of a question here, because now that ObjectDesktop by StarDock has dropped to $49.95 as well, while providing a much more mature alternative, is still a question of how you plan on using it.

Posted by BladedThoth on Friday, September 21, 2007