Every so often a real milestone comes to skinning. Where the technology available happens to coincide with the hardware people happen to be using.

Winamp 2's release would be an example of such a time. Windows XP and the release of WindowBlinds 3 near the same time would be another.

We think DesktopX version 2 may be such a time. Tonight version 1.98 beta was put up onto Object Desktop (via Stardock Central). If you don't have Object Desktop, you can get it by going to www.objectdesktop.com ( http://www.objectdesktop.com ). But for those of you who have access to it, this might be a good time to try it out the beta of DesktopX if you hvae any interest in skinning.

I'll be putting out a video demo so that it'll be more clear. But this version comes with some sample objects that give you a taste of what is possible and there are a ton of incredibly cool objects coming down the pike.

We will be splitting the DesktopX section into 2 sections - objects and themes. DesktopX themes are different than objects. A "theme" takes over your desktop whereas an object is merely enhancing your existing desktop. DesktopX 2 objects are fully scriptable and it's much easier to use than...well anything else that is even remotely similar. I could, for example, create an object and have it change its color based on the time of day in less than a minute.

As a fairly simple example, the beta includes some fish objects that swim around your desktop. These are just DX objects with a few dozen lines of VB scripting to give the fish some "intelligence".

DX objects can also be ActiveX controls which means if you're a developer you could use DesktopX to rapidly develop an application.

We're very excited about this. The video we'll be releasing this week will show more of it off but in the meantime, if you have Object Desktop already go ahead and give this a shot if you're comfortable running beta software.

Heh. You have to check this out.

The Register has an article that discusses the fact that at the end of the day, while the G5 may be a 64bit CPU, Panther, the code-name to MacOS 10.3, is still 32bit.

Over at Neowin I've started a desktop of the month video. I'm not sure how well it'll catch on, it's an extension of the screenshot of the month concept.

Here's mine from July: https://www.stardock.com/video/frogboy-july03.wmv

Here's what I'm doing in this video:

1) Been working a lot on DesktopX version 2. Those of you who like making scripts and such (VB Script, Javascript, etc.) are going to love DesktopX 2. We're going to have a free public beta shortly of it. In here, I have a bunch of fish objects that use a single page of VBscript code to control the fish.

DesktopX handles all the visual stuff so you only have to worry about the "guts" of the logic and just use PNGs for the graphics (or use a chart object or drawing object and have it handle the drawing).

2) Then I also got the final internal build of Keyboard LaunchPad 1.0. It's a program that lets you assign hotkeys to different pages. To get to WinCustomize I hit Ctrl-Alt-W and to go to Neowin, I jsut hit Ctrl-Alt-N. It also lets you save clipboard states to as hot keys too. So I have various Stardock logos, sigs, etc. saved as hotkeys that I can then use when I'm writing a document or posting or whatever. Stardock's tech support is moving to using Keyboard LaunchPad for canned replies.

3) And then finally I was playing around with a new build of SkinStudio. The newest builds let you take msstyles and bring them into the new Universal Skin Format that anyone can then write converters to various formats that they choose. We've written converts to take USF and make it into Media Player skins and WindowBlinds skin. So that msstyle skin you have you can convert to a Media Player skin (you choose a template or create your own template to control the layout and it then uses your msstyle or WB or whatever graphics for the buttons, borders, etc.).

This stuff is on Object Desktop. To get Object Desktop go to www.objectdesktop.com (http://www.objectdesktop.com).

So that's what I've been doing mostly this month.

The online magazine e-week, has an interesting article on Microsoft's .net initiative .

Check it out, it is very interesting

When you upload a skin, theme, or wallpaper and for some reason it doesn't get accepted or it takes awhile to get put up there or something else happens, please remember something important:

The moderators here are volunteers. They are people who care deeply about the skinning community and are trying to help.

As anyone who has ever volunteered their time for a community activity can tell you, ungrateful or rude or obnoxious treatment can really take the fun out of trying to help others.

Consider how important moderators are. Imagine if there weren't any. What would happen? WC would go unmoderated. Things would just show up and if there was a rip, well, the unfortunate victim would have to wade through technical support and hope that it would be addressed in a decent amount of time.  It is really the moderators who are the first line of defense in ensuring that the works of artists and designers are protected.

So whenever something goes wrong, please remember that the moderators and Jafo (an admin) are volunteering their time to help us all. Just something to think about before you email Jafo or DavidK or Paxx or Treetog or one of the other moderators an angry email yelling that your wallpaper was rejected or your theme didn't show up fast enough or that there's a skin that's too similar to yours.

Winamp 3 is no more. AOL's Nullsoft division has decided to discontinue Winamp 3 and return to enhancing Winamp 2 for the time being. A future "Winamp 5" will eventually become the next generation Winamp.

Winamp 3 was a very ambitious upgrade of Winamp. Rewritten almost entirely from scratch, it contained a new object oritend development language/environment known as Wasabi that would allow developers to create all kinds of things.

Unfortunately, such power requires memory and other resources which didn't appeal to Winamp's core user base which used Winamp because it was fast and light.

Winamp 3's cool skinning engine, however, is being brought to Winamp 2.

There's a new version of ObjectDock available. ObjectDock is a freeware program that combines a task manager and program launcher but does it with style.


New features:
-Thanks to Jairo Boudewyn for the great looking ObjectDock icon now in use!
-Context (right click) Menus added, functional for both windows and files.
-Clicking and holding on programs that have running indicators under
them will show a menu of all the windows open for that program.
-"ICL" icon library reading support added
-System icon loading greatly improved, works great with IconPackager now.
-Graphic files dropped onto the dock (bmp, jpg, psd, etc) are now represented on the dock by the image they contain rather than a generic icon.
-Speed improved, found a couple unneccessary slowdowns and eliminated them.
-autohide bug, would not re-show if window was maximized and on top/left/right side of the screen
-Various glitches and small issues fixed up.
-Background glitch when dock is semi-transparent, has no taskbar, and is aligned right/left along the top or bottom.
-Recycle bin should now detect and report activity on recycle bins on *all* drives, not just the c:\ drive.

Video Demo: https://www.stardock.com/video/demo_objectdock.wmv (Windows Media Player 9).

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