In the not-so-good news for Microsoft category, the EU has upheld the ruling that Windows XP in Europe will not have Windows Media Player.

"The evidence adduced by Microsoft is not sufficient to show that implementation of the remedies imposed by the Commission might cause serious and irreparable damage," the draft Court statement obtained by Reuters said.

Personally, I find this to be a bad move for European consumers. While it's always tempting to stick the giant in the eye, it's not the giant who will suffer in this case. At this stage in OS development it is very handy for both businesses and consumers to assume that the base OS includes video playing and music playing as part of the OS that supports a specific format (WMV in this case on video).

Read the whole article.

If you have Object Desktop, you have access to Theme Manager.  Theme Manager doesn't get talked about on-line nearly as much as it should. It's one of the most powerful Windows customization programs out there. But it is also incredibly easy to use. 

In my opinion, Theme Manager represents the best of Windows customization software -- it does a ton of things but it does it incredibly easily.

So what does Theme Manager do? Just what the name implies, it lets you manage all your themes. Not just themes though, your skins, icon packages, visual styles and more.  If you have SkinStudio installed, Theme Manager will even let you apply msstyles seamlessly.  If I click on the visual style item, it will display visual styles of all formats. It doesn't care about the format. The one in the screenshot is an msstyle.  Theme Manager is the only program that exists that can actually preview msstyles without having to hack your system DLL (uxtheme.dll).  And it will apply the msstyle quite seamlessly.

Just by pressing the apply button it takes care of things. And it does this without messing around with your system files.  That's because, under the covers, Theme Manager uses WindowBlinds and SkinStudio (both parts of Object Desktop).  But the person using Theme Manager won't even know that. It's all done as part of Theme Manager. This is where the object-oriented ness of Object Desktop's components come into play. 

Theme Manager doesn't stop there though. It does this for pretty much all the popular programs out there. Want a different CursorXP cursor? No problem.  Want to change your logon screen? No sweat. Want a different boot screen? Easy.  Theme Manager doesn't do these things itself, it works through other programs under the covers.  What if you don't have one of those programs? No problem, it'll go and download and install it for you.

So if you've got Object Desktop, download the latest version (2.19a as of the time of this writing). If you don't have Object Desktop, get it now at www.objectdesktop.com. Remember, with Object Desktop you get not only everything that it already has but everything that gets added and improved for a year afterwards.

Object Desktop users should check out recent updates of Theme Manager. A lot of work has been going into Theme Manager lately that is subtle but powerful.  For instance, if you have SkinStudio installed, Theme Manager will automatically treat all visual style formats the same (WindowBlinds and msstyles) and display them side by side with previews even.

Read the full article..

I have a guild on the Uther server (on as Draginol in case you're playing it).

Anyway, it would be nice to have a good WindowBlinds skin for World of Warcraft.  If someone makes a good one, I'll also approach my friends at Blizzard to see if they would want to share it with their users as well (no promises on that though of course).  But anyone interested in trying to create a good World of Warcraft skin?

Normally I would just use email to make a request but we just set up the Permissions topic on the General channel for requesting permissions for different things and since we don't make people's emails public in general, I wanted to show how one would go about this.

danillo0c, you have a really cool suite going there with Synthek, I would like to take it further by using your imagery to create some widgets with it. Could I have your permission for that? Just respond here if you are okay with that.

I whipped these up pretty quickly today but hopefully you'll find them cool:

[Download]

and

[Download]

Since widget programs like DesktopX started to become popular, there has been a precipitious decline in the # of new skinnable mini-programs. In the "golden age" of skinning when it was all fresh and new there were many skinnable mini programs.

There were skinnable programs for displaying the time, email status, IP address, RAM free, sticky notes, notebooks, etc.  Most people are familiar with skinnable media players (of which only two are thriving today - Media Player and Winamp) but most of these other types of skinnable mini-programs have seen a decline in popularity over the past couple of years. There are exceptions - Rainlendar and Sysmetrix but overall you don't see many new ones being made.

Is this from widgets? Or have programs like WindowBlinds made them less compelling or are there other reasons? What do you think?

At long last the ObjectBar 2 beta has arrived.  ObjectBar 2 will replace both ObjectBar and ControlCenter as it will be a superset of both programs.

The beta is still very early in its overall development but contains 3 key features:

The three big features in this beta are:

1. New virtual desktop manager. It's VERY early please keep in mind we'll be adding a lot of new features to this.
2. All new cleaned up user interface designed to make it much easier to work with bars and such.
3. Widget support.  You can embedd DesktopX widgets into your ObjectBar. This is incredibly cool. However, this feature is not designed so that end users will start stuffing widgets into their bars arbitrarily but rather for ObjectBar theme creators to be able to have a lot more flexibility. In other words, it is not being designed so that you can just go out and grab any old widget and throw it in there. The widget should be designed with being put into ObjectBar (so while you can put swimming fish into your bar, it's not designed for that and it'll do weird things no doubt).

You have to have Object Desktop to get this beta. If you don't have Object Desktop you can get it at www.objectdesktop.com.

If you have Object Desktop no doubt you've noticed that the ObjectBar 2.0 beta has finally arrived.

Note that this is a early beta so please bear in mind that we'll be adding a lot of features to it that are currently missing.

The three big features in this beta are:

1. New virtual desktop manager. It's VERY early please keep in mind we'll be adding a lot of new features to this.
2. All new cleaned up user interface designed to make it much easier to work with bars and such.
3. Widget support.  You can embedd DesktopX widgets into your ObjectBar. This is incredibly cool. However, this feature is not designed so that end users will start stuffing widgets into their bars arbitrarily but rather for ObjectBar theme creators to be able to have a lot more flexibility. In other words, it is not being designed so that you can just go out and grab any old widget and throw it in there. The widget should be designed with being put into ObjectBar (so while you can put swimming fish into your bar, it's not designed for that and it'll do weird things no doubt).

You have to have Object Desktop to get this beta. If you don't have Object Desktop you can get it at www.objectdesktop.com.