The 5th DesktopX 3 journal entry is now up. This one talks briefly about how to build your own desktop using DesktopX 3.
DesktopX 3 is a next generation desktop enhancement utility designed to allow people to add a whole new type of content to their Windows desktops.
Widgets have gotten a lot of attention in the past year. I admit, we've really fixated on the widget aspects of DesktopX since that's where a lot of the interest seems to have been. But with DesktopX 3, we have not forgotten about one of the most popular uses of DesktopX -- building a desktop.
To recap - DesktopX (Standard and Pro) enable users to create desktop objects on their Windows desktop. These objects can be as simple as a static picture or as complex as any stand alone program could imagine being. It's up to the user. These objects can be grouped together and exported. They can be exported as objects to be put on people's DesktopX enhanced desktop, they can be exported as widgets to be run as mini-programs...OR...they can be put together to build an entirely new desktop.
What I want to show is how easy it is to create a desktop. My example, to keep it simple, is pretty lame I confess but hopefully it'll cover enough of the basics that you can go from there.
First off, for my desktop I'm going to have a bottom bar and a right bar. So I'll need an image. I'm going to borrow an Aero-style PNG file I got on WinCustomize. Then I'm going to create a DesktopX object and assign its image to be that Aero PNG file. Then on the states tab I'm going to go to appearance and then "Advanced" and set up how it can be tiled and stretched. Basically I want to be able to resize this PNG image without it looking stretched out.
Now that I've done that, I'll resize it to make sure I did it right. I do that on the summary page.
Good. Looks good resized. Now, in DesktopX I can make things a % of the desktop. DesktopX is natively resolution independent (unfortunately, most people choose to hard code the size of their exported desktops which is almost always unnecessary). So I'm going to make my image be 100% of the horizontal size but 64 pixels tall.
Now to do the same with a vertical one which I created using "clone".
Next I will prepare to hide my Windows desktop icons and Start bar.
Now for fun I'm going to put the date and time. DesktopX includes a plugin that does this. So I just select that under "additional abilities" and then make that object of type text.
Okay, so here's my little text object. I changed the colors and gave it a border so that it stands out.
Now, one of the things that's important to remember when building a desktop is that you'll want all your "desktop" items to be of the desktop z-order (by default, objects are created at the Normal z-order). You want your desktop stuff to always show up below your windows.
Now I need a Start button. Okay, here I cheated, I went onto the DesktopX area and did a search for a start button. This just brings up the Windows Start menu.
Now to add a system tray.
Make it match my existing look.
And then toss it on there. Now, I also need to reserve the space for my various docks. There's tons of ways to do this. The easy/lame way is to just go and set the workspace area.
I'm just maximizing my window so you can see the effect of workspaces.
Now I start importing objects to put on my docks. Then I go to the ObjectDock section on www.wincustomize.com to start finding more specific PNG and icon files I want.
One thing nice about DesktopX objects when dealing with icons and such is that you can control their size and you can control how they behave in different instances (such as mouse over). I also gave this object a shadow.
So now let's create another object that I'll use as a pop up.
Using my trusty Aero image once again I have made a nice box.
So now I'm going to need a thin that when clicked on will toggle my pop up. So I grabbed this. I will resize it to 32x32 (looks really cool big eh?).
So now I make this object an "object controller".
And I turn my pop up window into a toggle popup.
And voila. Drag and drop some stuff on there, put some MP3 player controls I made on there and I have an interactive pop up window.
Now to export my desktop.
..and I'm done.
A new feature for WinCustomize subscribers is now available - photo albums. This new feature enables users who have WinCustomize subscriptions to easily upload up to 20 megabytes of images through a built in Explorer-like interface (for being able to upload dozens of pictures at a time) that become part of their photo album.
You can see an example of these photo albums through my personal page linked below. As some of you know, WinCustomize costs tens of thousands of dollars each month to keep running. With nearly 4 million unique visitors and many TERRAbits of bandwidth being used each month, we need every subscriber we can get. To become a subscriber (or renew) go here: https://www.wincustomize.com/store/index.aspx
You can check out my embarassing pictures blow.
My 8 year old son is featured in a full page article in this month's Computer Games Magazine. Okay, I admit it, I wrote the article but it's about his adventures in the popular massively multiplayer game, World of Warcraft. Check out the link below for a link to the article. If you see it at your local store, check it out. It includes a picture of my son's character dancing!
In this month's (April 2005) issue of Computer Games Magazine there is an article I've written about my 8 year old son, Alex. It's about his adventures as a Night Elf as part of our guild ("MythInc") on the Uther server in the game World of Warcraft.
World of Warcraft isn't perfect, I know I have a long list of issues with the game. But it is, overall, a fantastic game. And for my son, it's a real thrill. Him and his younger brother (Ryan, 4) will pretend to be playing the game even outside of World of Warcraft. Ryan will run around with a plastic axe tucked in under his shrt behind his back. When he gets killed, he pretends he's a ghost and runs in that trademark World of Warcraft character running style back to his body.
That's the ironic thing about World of Warcraft, it actually works well as a game for all ages. It's not particularly gory. The most significant moral qualm is that many of the quests are essentially about going out to the countrside and butchering sentient creatures and taking their stuff so that you can get better at going out and butchering other sentient creatures to take their stuff and so forth. But that's not how my son is playing it anyway. For him, it's about fishing, hunting deer, cooking food, exploring the world, helping other people. Not that he doesn't kill his share fo gnolls and bandits, but overall, he's getting a much fuller experience than the typical player is I suspect.
For those of you not familiar with Stardock, it's the company that pays for most of the costs of WinCustomize.com. Yesterday, we finally got around to updating the Products Page on the Stardock home page.
I'm having one of those days today. I was supposed to give a class to our marketing & sales team today on how to effectively use Frontpage. So I brought in my trusty ThinkPad T40 laptop that I practically live on, fired it up, and got a blue screen saying that I had a corrupted volume. Luckily, it's NTFS so I can recover my data. But it's going to be a full reinstall on that computer.
The other hassle is trying to get into the new building. Stardock has purchased a new building in Plymouth Michigan (we currently lease). But it's new new which means we're dealing with contractors and such. Some contractors are good. Some are good at charging what seems to me to be obscene amounts for trivial things. We don't have to be in the building at any particular time so we have a lot of leverage on the builders and such but it is incredibly frustrating dealing with that kind of thing on top of everything else. It'll get sorted out I'm sure but I just want it all done so we can move in.
Below are some pictures from the new building that Marcel (Redmak) took while they were visiting recently.
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Stardock has released ObjectDock v1.11. ObjectDock is a program that enables users to add a "dock" to their Windows desktop that contains short-cuts, running tasks, and "docklets". It is highly configurable, easy to use, and very useful. You can learn more about it here.
New in version 1.11 includes:
ObjectDock is freeware. A plus version is also available that adds tabs, system tray support, task grouping, and hotspot support. Its home page is www.objectdock.com.
