I just had Rainmeter drawn to my attention. How did I miss it for so long? It is a way of customizing your computer’s desktop background and making it interactive.

The first thing that came to mind was obviously Star Trek’s interactive computer screens from The Next Generation onward.

I mentioned a few years ago my disappointment that an iPad could not be customized to have that kind of interactive format, and pointed out that one could make a PC at least look like that (admittedly not at that time in a truly interactive way).

But now, sites like customize.org offer skins for Rainmeter which are interactive and look like the Star Trek LCARS interface.

And so it seems that the future Star Trek envisaged is drawing closer. And it’s about time, since we’ve had phones better than the communicators on the original series for a while now.

But how does this experience compare to the iPad, with its apps? Would you rather have what iPads offer, or the usual PC desktop, or Rainmeter in some form, or LCARS as it appears in Star Trek? What’s your ideal device interface?