Glass widgets that sit on your desktop, not in the dock.
Two ways to get it
Installer: Aero.Dock_1.3.0_x64-setup.exe. Per user, no admin rights.
Portable: Aero.Dock_1.3.0_x64-portable.zip. Unpack it anywhere and run Aero Dock.exe.
Windows will show a SmartScreen box either way, because the build is not code signed. Click More info, then Run anyway.
Aero Widgets
Five to start with:
- Clock, either an analogue face with a sweeping second hand or a digital readout, 12 or 24 hour.
- Calendar, a month at a glance, with the week starting where your locale starts it.
- Weather, current conditions for coordinates you type in.
- System stats, processor, memory and uptime.
- Music, whatever Windows is currently playing, with skip and pause. No per-app setup, it reads the same session the volume keys do.
Turn them on in Settings, under Desktop widgets. Drag one to move it, drag its bottom right corner to resize, and lock it once it is where you want it. Everywhere else on the desktop keeps working exactly as before, so icons, right clicks and drag selection are untouched.
Each widget carries its own look: Classic or Liquid, its own tint, its own opacity, its own ambient bubbles. One widget can be Liquid while the dock stays Classic.
Liquid works out here
The dock cannot refract, because it is a transparent window and Windows never hands it the desktop pixels to bend. Widgets get around that rather than living with it. Each one paints its own ambient bubbles behind its glass, so the glass has something real to bend even though the window behind it is empty. That is genuine refraction, not a blur.
The bubbles hold still on purpose. Anything moving behind a refracting panel forces it to redraw every frame, and a desktop full of widgets doing that is the one way this gets expensive.
Weather is the only thing that goes online
This is worth saying plainly, because until now Aero Dock made no network requests at all and the README said so.
Weather is the exception, and it takes two deliberate steps to reach: add the widget, then allow it in Settings. It asks Open-Meteo for conditions at the coordinates you type, and sends nothing else. No account, no key, no location lookup, nothing about you. Leave it off and nothing in the app touches the network. Every other widget runs entirely offline.
On memory
All the widgets share one window rather than taking one each. A second webview costs roughly what the whole dock costs, so five separate widget windows would have thrown away the memory work from 1.2.1. Instead one window spans the desktop and is told which parts of itself are real, which is also what keeps the rest of the desktop clickable.
The dock with five widgets up measures about 274 MB, against roughly 180 MB for the dock on its own.
Known rough edges
- The weather widget has no place search. You type latitude and longitude.
- Multi-monitor and scaled displays are handled in physical pixels and should be correct, but I have only tested a single 1080p screen. If a widget lands in the wrong place, that is why, and an issue with your setup would help.
Download either file below. If something is broken, open an issue.