Aston2 will provide the unique appearance for your Desktop. Aston2 has enhanced the basic shell components and added original elements, extending the Desktop capabilities: widgets (calendar, clock, weather forecast etc.), live wallpapers in themes, easily adjustable panels. Aston2 is one of the most stable and reliable Windows shells ever, incredible adjustment and application simplicity of which will never be unnoticed even by a novice user.

Aston2 features:
1. Settings flexibility, science fiction themes creation capability
2. Animated skins
3. Live wallpapers
4. Skin 3D objects support
5. Widgets support (analog clock, weather forecast, power management, system resources monitor, etc.)
6. Easy wigdets personalization
7. Themes' support and their application simpleness
8. Customization simplicity and usability even for a novice user
9. Multi-language support
10. Systems with several monitors support
11. Color labels for desktop icons
12. Effects support for icons
13. Quick search on local disks and in the internet
14. Progress indicator for tasks
15. Sound effects

Top 5 reasons to switch to Aston2
1. Flexibility.
Create your own desktop and make it look and behave the way you like. That's the main idea about Aston2. Bind hotkeys, tweak desktop components, install plug-ins, never lose control over your desktop. No wizardry here, everything is simple. Even if you're not an experienced designer or programmer, you can create your own desktop the way you want it to behave, not like someone else does.
2. Beauty.
Aston looks great out of the box and if you want more, you can get free themes from our themes section or one of numerous related sites. You can change your Desktop's look and behavior with just a few mouse clicks.
3. Reliability.
Tested extensively on numerous computers Aston2 is known to be the most stable program of this kind. It's much more stable than competing programs and even the native Windows desktop.
4. Power.
Whether you have Windows XP or Windows Vista, Aston runs smoothly on any system, providing you with additional toolbars, launch panels and other useful components, allowing you to get more control over your system.
5. Usability.
We have taken into consideration our working experience with Aston1 and tried to meet all your expectations. Upon installing Aston2 a user may be thrilled that the most number of his wishes has been already implemented into the program and he doesn't have to make any drastic changes in preferences.

Theme file for Aston2 is just renamed ZIP-archive. It contains resources (images, sounds, etc.) and layout files. Aston2 supports following extensions for theme files:
*.a2menu - for start menu only
*.a2panel - for panels only (including the task bar)
*.a2desktop - for desktop only (including wallpapers and floating widgets)
*.a2theme - full theme with start menu, panels and desktop

Skin is the basic graphics object in Aston2. Skin layout defines in a special XML file that references to resources (images, sounds, etc.). Usualy, each widget reads skin layout from individual XML file. Actualy, here are supported file names:
1. Panel.xml - for panels
2. Desktop.xml - for wallpapers
3. Start Button.xml - for start button widget
4. User Name.xml - for user name widget
5. Recycle Bin.xml - for recycled bin widget
6. Search.xml - for search widget
7. Clock.xml - for clock widget
8. Calendar.xml - for calendar widget
9. Weather.xml - for weather widget
10. Resmon.xml - for resource monitor
11. LangSwitcher.xml - for language switch bar
12. Notebook.xml - for notebook widget
13. Menu.xml - for menu based widgets like: tray, quick launch, task list, top list, search popup, disks, power control, desktop icons, etc.

The license of this software is Free Trial Software, the price is $39.95, you can free download and get a free trial.