A little satire on how seriously some people take role playing.

(looks up at the ceiling)

Been playing with an internal build of DesktopX 2.21 over the weekend. It fixes some bugs that we had been running into in our quest to create higher quality widgets and themes.  It probably won't affect the end user experience but for those people making widgets and themes, the changes will make their lives easier.

I know I seem obsessed with the whole widget thing lately. That's mainly because I am obsessed with the whole widget thing lately. I don't know what it is, but I just love the idea of being able to create really neat visual things on my desktop that are of my own creation that don't involve hours and hours of work.

Take fancy icon labels for example. I created a DesktopX object that has really fancy text labels under it. It's very flexible and you just right click and clone them and change the image as often as you want and can create a whole desktop of very nice big "super icons" with text labels.  Check out the article on that here. I did this in about 5 minutes though. Only 30 or so lines of VB Script and now people can have icons on their desktop with nice icon labels under them.

On the down side, fanboy wars are starting to brew. This is a real bummer because well, it usually means we get beat up a lot. One can trace the whole "WindowBlinds SUX!" stuff back to when msstyles first started coming out. It wasn't enough for some of those users to go with their choice. No, they had to go out and trash WindowBlinds.  It's simmered down quite a bit but anyone who's been around can remember what it was like for every WindowBlinds news item or whatever to have a small army of msstyles advocates insisting that WB was crap and that the reason it was so popular was because people were "stupid sheep" (it couldn't possibly have been because it was faster, used less memory and has tons more features but I digress).

So now I fear we're starting to see the same thing in the widget arena. But this time we have an idea what causes this phenomenon: When a product (freeware or not) has no official home base where its most..passionate users can hang out, they tend to end up on community sites. And so they try to turn those community sites into their home base and drive off all others. 

That sort of thing led to a recent blow-out on Aqua-Soft. Aqua-Soft is one of the most superbly run net communiteis around. But as we've seen here on WinCustomize even, from time to time the community itself can get out of hand. 

I've written previously how much I like the various widget programs. Samurize, Avedesk, Kapsules, and of course DesktopX (and on my Mac I'm a registered user of Konfabulator). Like I said, I'm totally into this stuff. But I worry you're going to see the same sort of nonsense we saw with the msstyles vs. WindowBlinds stuff.  Rather than respect the choices people make, some people would go out of their way to attack and harass others for their choices and opinions.

But then again, when I go into the lion's den and talk about these things, I feel like anything I say is going to be distorted into something awful. Here is a rule of thumb: If the website gets less than 1 million unique visitors per month, then someone who makes a living doing software is only on there because they care about the product or service personally. There's no business justification to hang out on some niche site talking shop - especially on labor day. Believe it or not, people who make a living writing software actually do care about their software just as much as the "freeware" author.

But like I said, I'm really into the whole concept of doing cool stuff with your desktop. I think with Longhorn coming that we're just at the beginning of the cool stuff that will become possible. I am hoping all these programs gather followers - a rising tide lifts all boats. But if it becomes a battle of niche programs, they will all remain niche programs.

On a sadder note, my pet frog "Kermit" died yesterday. We had had him for 5 years so we were pretty bummed out. He had had a long life though. He was one of those little African frogs that people (5 years ago) could buy at the mall.

We had him in the original aquarium with his roommate Gary, the snail. Now Gary is alone and we have to figure out a way for him to find..um "food" now that the frog isn't there anymore. That leaves us with just Cuddles (the box turtle I've had for the past 18 years).

So next week we'll be starting to roll out WinCustomize v4. First to our admins/moderators and then slowly on out to WinCustomize subscribers and beyond. Lots of good stuff in there.

Also next week we'll be releasing The Natural Desktop. Imagine taking incredibly cool looking wallpapers, a huge volume of custom sound tracks for outside sounds, and tying them all together with logic that looks at the time of day, weather conditions, and time of year. The screenshots won't do it justice since it's really the overall "experience" (visual, audio, and subtle workings) that make it so cool. But you'll hear more about that this week.

Have fun!

Sometimes I think that I must be in dire need of a communications course. Because I'll write something and someone will take it to be the most vile thing.

The basic problem I see though is that some people aren't familiar with economies of scale.  A website that gets less than 1,000 daily visitors is not a good target for "marketing". If someone from a company is participating on such a site, they're not doing it for business reasons.

Consider this exchange:

(original review of Avedesk on AquaXP.com begins)

No single application released this year has had as dramatic an impact on GUI modding as the release of AveDesk. Its version 1.0 release was a milestone in user-friendly desktop enhancement, gaining quick popularity among customizers the world over.

It then goes on for awhile and asserts that Stardock isn't worried because these freeware projects tend to fade off.  While I agree with the sentiment, until recently, I wasn't really following Avedesk.  I never made any comment on Avedesk in that manner. Avedesk is, in our mind, a program that lets ObjectDock plugins to run on the desktop (as well as other plugins).  It's definitely cool but I think the hyperbole above is a bit of a stretch.

Which is what I essentially wrote:

I can totally see how someone might see me "dissing" Avedesk. But I think that is more of a matter of willful interpretation. When the guy who makes the Avedesk tutorial then makes a review touting it as essentially the greatest thing this year in a year that has seen the release of things like DesktopX 2.x, Kapsules, ObjectDockPlus, and major Samurize updates along with of course all the other things, I think that invites a reality check.

Avedesk is largely dependent on Andreas to create new content because few people make plugins (how many third party DesktopX plugins have you seen lately?). Kapsules, Samurize, and DesktopX, by contrast, can have totally new things created relatively easily by third parties.

The author responded:

well, before avedesk, the only app people (typically) used to emulate OS X / Panther labels and folder content for dtop icons was samurize. i stand by the use of ‘dramatic’ in this context, despite other apps’ capabilities before or after avedesk’s release.

Icon labels? We're talking icon labels being the key thing here? Last night I whipped up icon labels on my own using VB Script for DesktopX objects that are even more flexible than what's on Avedesk. I don't consider that a big deal because icon labels are..well icon labels.  If we're going to get into fancy icons on the desktop, what about IconX then? What about the things Kapsules can do? Heck, what about the Expose program that's being made for Windows?

But still things were pretty reasonable then this stuff comes in:

and

My respond to Herd:

I admit to being annoyed when I wrote this.  I get so sick of people acting like I have no right to express my opinion. Oh, it's fine for other programs to throw up PayPal donations. They're still freeware.  But DesktopX, which has no time outs and isn't crippled and hence is totally free to use shouldn't have the same right to defend themselves as the others because it's made by a software company and it too has a way to support it by buying the enhanced version.

Just thinking about it makes me annoyed. Like yea, I'm hanging out on a Sunday on a website that probably gets less than 100 unique visitors per day writing a 2 paragraph response because I want to "advertise". Only in kid-land does that kind of logic make sense.   Let's see, AquaXP.com's Alexa traffic ranking last week:  1,236,898th.

I'm not trying to insult them but I really get tired of people who cry "advertising" on some site that doesn't get enough traffic to make a business case for hanging out on at all. I'm on there for the same reasons they are, because I'm into this stuff.

Anyway.. Steve shows up:

@Brad: I’ve stayed out of this argument until now but I must say, for someone who makes his living from communities such as the Aqua emulation community, you sure know how to ensure potential ill feeling towards yourself and your company from the community at large. I’m not saying your standpoint is right or wrong, but you could certainly act far more professionally than you have done thus far. Perhaps you were incited to act this way, but that’s still no good reason for you to act this way, especially as a public face for your company.

Apparently Steve buys into the fantasy too.   It's the same logic that lets people think "Well we talk about Avedesk because it's obviously the most popular - the same 10 people keep posting about it so it must be really popular."

I think the reason it bugs me is that people should know better than this.

Aqua-Soft, like most sites, track the number of views a thread gets. That is, the number of times an article has been read. So for instance, the Avedesk tutorial has a total of 841 views. That means it's been clicked on 841 times (that includes repeat viewings). So your best case scenario, assuming no duplicates that's 841 people. And the rule of thumb is to take views and  divide it by half the number of responses to figure out a ballpark number of unique people so it's really likely closer to 150 people.  In fact, the most popular thread about Avedesk on that page has only 6,000 views (a screenshot thread).

Anyway, the point is that marketing/commercialism isn't the driving force here. We are all a bunch of guys who are really into this stuff.  I don't think the sub 1000 people *actively* using Avedesk are goign to make or break anything.  Andrew, myself, Andreas, etc. are software developers who invest a lot of our energy into this stuff. We care about it. And it ticks me off when I'm treated like the only reason I'm posting is because of money. I don't get a royalty on DesktopX and if it was about money, I'd be posting about WindowBlinds or The Political Machine or Galactic Civilizations.

DesktopX doesn't even show up on our pie chart.  I post about it because I think it's totally cool and that others will find it totally cool if they ry it.

But in communities, a dozen or two vocal users can give the appearance of popularity. It's certainly more popular over there than DesktopX is.  But to put things in perspective,  the M12 WindowBlinds visual style has about a 1000 downloads so far today and it's only early afternoon here.

So these guys need to get a grip and realize that this whole widget stuff is very niche stuff.  If my posting was driven by commercialism, I would focus exclusivley on WindowBlinds which is by far the most popular.  But right now I'm into widgets so I like talking about them.

And I like to talk about ALL of them. I just don't like fanboys trying to trash or put down all the others to build themselves up. Don't go and post that Avedesk is incredibly popular or making a huge wave when the evidence shows that it is, at best, a distant third in the Windows widget programs.  And I'm not even including things like SysMetrix which are also quite popular.

It need not be an "us vs. them". It should be all of them working together. This whole mess reminds me of tribal squabbling. It's all very niche right now. If that's going to change, ALL the programs that do this must become a LOT more popular.

So it was kind of bugging me. I kept hearing how DesktopX couldn't do fancy icon labels. DesktopX certainly was capable of it. We just hadn't built in the feature into DesktopX.  So I decided I would make it so that people could have big friendly icons on their desktop with fancy labels.

So here's how I did it:

First: I realized that I would need 3 objects:

    Object 1: The pretty icon.
    Object 2: The pretty label background
    Object 3: The label text itself.

Secondly, since the goal was to make is to that other users could just right click on something and clone it to have more, I couldn't refer to specific object names. I would have to deal with them through parents. So I made the label background the parent of the label text but the child of the fancy icon.  That way I could have the label text communicate with its parent and its parent's parent (got that?).

In DesktopX, you get to an object's parent's object info like this: object.parent.object.  If you think that's a bit strange looking, imagine getting to the parent objects's parent: object.parent.object.parent.object.  Woha.  But that's how it's done.

So for the label background I made a single .PNG image in Corel Photopaint. Basically it was a square with two circle masks but I got my fancy image going that looked close to screenshots I've seen of other fancy labels on the Mac and elsewhere.

Then for the label text I wrote this code:

Very straight forward. I used the documentation at: https://www.stardock.com/products/desktopx/Docs/22/ScriptingGuide.htm to figure out how to do this.

So basically the way I made it work is that I used "persistent storage" so that it will remember the label I type in.  Then, when I click on the actual label have it bring up a message box to change the text.  I found a "bug" in DesktopX in that I need to actually change the state for it to recognize that the size has changed.  So I created a "labelchange" state in the labeltext object and change the state to that. Then in there I do some work to size the background and move it so that it is positioned correctly under the parent object.  Plus I wanted to make sure that if I make my icon really big or small it'll still center right.

I can also change the color of the labels just by right clicking on the label background and going to the appearance tab on the state page and changing the hue.  And if I want more, I just right click and choose clone.

The whole thing took about 5 minutes (took longer to create this little report).

Download it now: https://www.wincustomize.com/skins.asp?library=3&SkinID=3609

Makes sure you have DesktopX 2.2 or later installed.

So it was kind of bugging me. I kept hearing how DesktopX couldn't do fancy icon labels. DesktopX certainly was capable of it. We just hadn't built in the feature into DesktopX.  So I decided I would make it so that people could have big friendly icons on their desktop with fancy labels.

So here's how I did it:

First: I realized that I would need 3 objects:

    Object 1: The pretty icon.
    Object 2: The pretty label background
    Object 3: The label text itself.

Secondly, since the goal was to make is to that other users could just right click on something and clone it to have more, I couldn't refer to specific object names. I would have to deal with them through parents. So I made the label background the parent of the label text but the child of the fancy icon.  That way I could have the label text communicate with its parent and its parent's parent (got that?).

In DesktopX, you get to an object's parent's object info like this: object.parent.object.  If you think that's a bit strange looking, imagine getting to the parent objects's parent: object.parent.object.parent.object.  Woha.  But that's how it's done.

So for the label background I made a single .PNG image in Corel Photopaint. Basically it was a square with two circle masks but I got my fancy image going that looked close to screenshots I've seen of other fancy labels on the Mac and elsewhere.

Then for the label text I wrote this code:

Very straight forward. I used the documentation at: https://www.stardock.com/products/desktopx/Docs/22/ScriptingGuide.htm to figure out how to do this.

So basically the way I made it work is that I used "persistent storage" so that it will remember the label I type in.  Then, when I click on the actual label have it bring up a message box to change the text.  I found a "bug" in DesktopX in that I need to actually change the state for it to recognize that the size has changed.  So I created a "labelchange" state in the labeltext object and change the state to that. Then in there I do some work to size the background and move it so that it is positioned correctly under the parent object.  Plus I wanted to make sure that if I make my icon really big or small it'll still center right.

I can also change the color of the labels just by right clicking on the label background and going to the appearance tab on the state page and changing the hue.  And if I want more, I just right click and choose clone.

The whole thing took about 5 minutes (took longer to create this little report).

Download it now: https://www.wincustomize.com/skins.asp?library=3&SkinID=3609

Makes sure you have DesktopX 2.2 or later installed.

Anyone who, like me, watched the Hardball interview with Zell Miller in which Senator Miller nearly challenges host Chris Mathews to a duel probably came away with the impression that Senator Miller is nuts or at least a crotchety old crank.

Not true though.  Miller, a veteran of cable TV show interviews, does not like having words put into his mouth.  Mathews wasn't trying to do that (in my opinion) in this particular case. But Miller was wary of Mathews after his recent poor treatment of Michelle Malkin.  In that interview, Mathews put words in her mouth and misrepresented her views to spin the conversation leftward. 

My opinion is that Miller, having seen that interview, was suspicious of Mathews already and so when things appeared (to him) to be going that way he jumped on Mathews.

Read the link below of Malkin's own account of what happened.

(btw, I like Hardball and don't have an opinion one way or the other on Chris Mathews other than noting that he's a bit left of center politically).

The tolerent, thoughtful left wing of America had a week of enlightening protests.  Here's a link that goes over them in some detail.

Martin and I have been uploading quite a few DesktopX objects and widgets we've made.  Now, you have our open permission to take those things and modify them however you want to create new DesktopX objects/widgets with them.

Normally, people modify widgets through the DesktopX GUI (i.e. right clicking on an object, going to its properties and changing images).  But if you want to "skin" the whole thing? This article walks you through it. But let me give you a hint: .dxpacks are simply .ZIP files renamed. Just jump in there and modify the images. Have fun!

Today I want to show you how to SKIN a DesktopX object/widget -- without using a GUI.  One frustration of skinners is that if you work with complicated width or object group it gets tedious to try to create other visual editions of it.

Let me give you an example:

This is the iTunes widget for DesktopX. It's really cool. But what if you want to make change the way it looks. Not the shape so much but to change around the graphics some.  One way is to work with each object in there to do it. But that can be quite difficult to do and time consuming. But there's another way: Get into its object package.

Object packages

Object packages have the extension .dxpack.  If you want to get a widget into that state, you have to first import the widget into DesktopX using the import menu item in DesktopX.  Then you need to right click on the imported widget and export it as an object package.

Once you have your .dxpack you're ready to begin.  A .dxpack is simply a ZIP file renamed. So to get into it just rename its extension to .ZIP and open it up. Now extract it to some folder so you can work on the stuff:

Once you have it in a folder:

Now you're ready to go. Now you can modify the images to your looking. Use alpha channels in Photoshop (or your favorite graphics package) to determine which areas are transparent.

And just like that, you'll have a new skin. ZIP it back up, rename to .dxpack and off you go. And if you want to move around controls, hold down the CTRL key to move them around (note: DesktopX 2.21 adds support for moving objects that have been combined together into a contained window too).

Have fun!

BTW, any objects created by Stardock people that aren't marked for use by registered users only you may use and modify and upload your own derivatives with our permission. That includes any objects by me (Frogboy) or Martin.

Xfire are hosting their first ever Skinning Contest! Whether you are a professional or an amateur skin creator, this is the ideal contest for you. With big prizes and several different categories, you have a great chance to win.

The contest is split up into three categories:

Xfire Themed:
The best skin incorporating an Xfire theme (logos, colors, etc.) will be chosen. This is the most general category – any design will be considered, as long as it features Xfire themes. This skin would be intended for distribution as a default, or alternative to the default, skin with the Xfire client.

Game Themed:
The best skin focused on a specific game will be chosen. This skin should use the logo, colors, theme of a game or game series. In order to distribute the skin, Xfire will need to secure rights to relevant logos, trademarks, etc. We have already secured permission for Call of Duty and America’s Army skins. Skins based on other games are welcome, but we will need to work with the artist and the game publisher in order to obtain the appropriate distribution rights, otherwise winners may not be distributed.

Brand Themed:
The best skin incorporating the logo, theme, and colors of a favorite consumer brand will be chosen. As with the Game Themed skins, we have already secured permission to create and distribute a Mountain Dew and SpikeTV themed skin. Skins based on other consumer brands are welcome, but we will need to work with the artist and the brand owner in order to obtain the appropriate distribution rights, otherwise winners may not be distributed.

prizes:
In each category, the prizes will be as follows:

First Place
$700

Second Place
$200

Third Place
$100

Now, you can enter multiple categories, with multiple entries, as long as you have multiple skins. That means a total of $3000 is up for grabs to Xfire users and skinners.

However, we've also added ANOTHER prize to each category. For those of you who are great artists but haven't had a chance to create an Xfire skin yet, we've created a special $300 prize for artwork-only submissions. If you've got a great concept for a cool Xfire skin, but don't want to learn all the coding, submit your artwork and go for this prize!

More information can be found here on how to enter and more contest details.

Good luck to all those who enter!