Can you believe 2006 is here! Holy cow!
On behalf of everyone at WinCustomize.com, happy new year!
2006 is THE YEAR. A lot of people may not realize this but 2006 is going to be a defining year in the history of personal computing. The reason has to do with Windows Vista. It's not that Windows Vista is just some new version of Windows, it is that the underlying technology of Windows is being completely replaced.
For the past 10 years (and more) we've been using the same technology for displaying fonts, images, graphics, windows, etc. It was all based on a 2D, 16color system. In time, it was expanded to support 16.8 million colors but visually, it was all based on pictures or 2D vectors (at best) with visibility either on or off (most skins still rely on "magic pink" to determine whether they are visible or not).
But with Windows Vista, things are being changed. GDI, which is the display system we've had with Windows since Windows 3.0 is being replaced by something called WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) which is 3D based. The screen you look today is based on "blitting" 2D images. In Windows Vista, it's a 3D surface that is hardware accelerated by your video card.
The networking you use is based on a hodge podge of fairly insecure protocols written in the kumbaya days when it would be cool for us all to be able to look at each other's computer and "share". Those naive days are long past but we still patch up the patches that try to retroactively close the door. Instead, Windows Vista brings the Windows Communication Foundation which is a much more powerful (for developers) system that was built with security in mind from the start.
And Microsoft's .NET support is part of the OS. Right now, many developers (including Stardock) don't use .NET because they won't require their customers to go download a 30 meg extra download in order to use their stuff. It's not that .NET is "bloated" btw, it's just a class library that has its own DLLs and such that have to be used. With Vista, .NET is part of the OS and developers will be able to much more easily create very interesting and useful things.
How Windows Vista will affect skinning remains to be seen. From what we've looked at so far, it'll be great. While Microsoft is not going to make customization part of the OS (to an even lesser degree than Windows XP), it will be possible for third parties to hook in and do some amazing things (And you can bet if we'll raise a storm if MS reverses this direction).
WinCustomize will likely end up with sections like "Animated Wallpapers" and XAML parts and Microsoft gadgets and new stuff from Google and Yahoo and elsewhere!
Stardock has what it believes is a killer application in store to be added to Object Desktop AFTER Vista ships (like many historically "good" ideas, once you know what it is, it seems obvious in hindsight so Stardock is keeping it very quiet until it's too late for it to be added to the OS or for others to do something similar for Vista by release).
Wherever you are in the world, Happy New Year to you! Feel free to add yourself to WinCustomize's FRAPPR community!
Tomorrow I head out to CES. I'm going not as a software developer but rather on behalf of WinCustomize.com. In other words, as a member of the press (complete with press badge).