http://www.guiolympics.com/news_comments_full.asp?NewsID=33

What do you think?

The founder of OSOpinion.com has written a scathing article condemning "skinning" and "theming" as something that is bad for users. His solution is that "skinning must be halted at the OS level by manufacturers through any means necessary".

Click on the full story to see our response to this. What's your opinion?

Next week, ObjectBar 1.0 will finally come out after nearly 2 years of development.

During the beta, nearly 60 different themes for it have already been created. ObjectBar's features though are primarily in productivity. The fact that it also has perhaps the most flexible skin format ever created for a program of its kind is just a bonus.

No program available can do the things ObjectBar can do. For Windows 98/NT/2000/ ME users it can do the Windows XP start bar completely. We're not talking just looking like it, it can provide the actual new functionality of it. At the same time, it is flexible enough to also do the MacOS Finder bar - not just look like it, but act like it (including stripping menu bars from your apps and having them as part of the bar).

Check out this guided tour to get an idea of just some of the things it can do.

Few people have done as much for moving personal desktop customization as Nate Mook. Nate Mook is the founder of Betanews.com and very early on was spreading the word on the new breed of "desktop enhancements" that would allow users to customize their desktops. Without Betanews.com, the Windows customization revolution we've seen over the past few years may never have happened. Click on a full story to read an interview with Nate Mook where he discusses the history of Betanews, his experiences with eFront (Nate was the one who came up with the name eFront), and more.

DesktopX 1.0 was released last July. And work on it hasn't ceased since. DesktopX has emerged as a very popular desktop customization program. However, Stardock has been developing it to move beyond being merely seen as a cool and easy way to add desktop eye candy.

With v1.1, DesktopX takes its first step towards DesktopX NG in which COM objects and DesktopX objects are combined.

In v1.1, a user can use DXScript to create objects that talk directly with COM objects as well as other DesktopX objects. A few samples are included such as a website news reader, an object that reports whether it is day or not, and a temperature object (give it your area code and it will tell you the real time temperature).

The big advantage of DesktopX is that these things use up virtually no additional resources. For instance, DesktopX displaying the temperature uses less memory than a stand alone program doing the same thing because it's using COM objects already in memory.

A could create a desktop that has various Windows Media PLayer objects on it. Or how about a DesktopX object that plays a particular Internet music channel that they then distribute? Since Quicktime is a COM object, imagine a DesktopX object that is designed to play a particular website's quicktime movie (or movie of the day automatically). All these things become possible and easy to do.

Here's a real world example:
Some websites feature a "Movie trailer of the day". A user could create a DesktopX object that automatically grabs the link to that movie trailer of the day and has a single button to play it on the DX object. The DX object would probably be less than 100K because it's using the Quicktime COM objects already bundled.

Another example would be a DesktopX object of a particular person in which you could send them email or instant message them. Users could email back and forth their Personal object that has all the information they want to include with it.

In the past, these kinds of things would require users develop their own VB application or C# or C++ app. But DesktopX takes care of all the grunt work, the developer just picks what COM object to use and the VBscript (or Javascript) to specialize it for their use.

The goal is to let users and developers have total control over how both local and Internet content is displayed and distributed. Right now the world works with very large monolithic COM containers (3 examples of COM containers - MS Word, MS Excel, and Internet Explorer). These containers are made up of dozens of COM objects and are made to be very generalized. DesktopX 1.1 and especially the future DesktopX NG lets users deal with these COM objects individually to create either customized desktops or simply objects to send to other people that are specific to the needs of their users.

As mentioned earlier, there's really no limit to the number of beneficial uses of something like this.

One of the fun examples Stardock is going to make soon is an object in which the user types in their email address and it will display in real time how many downloads all their skins on WinCustomize.com have received that day.

An internal object Stardock is going to create will be a bandwidth object that queries the bandwidth use of Stardock's various servers from .ASP pages and then displays it as a simple number in Megabits per second.

Another useful but simple object is an Emergency object. Basically this object will be invisible but if there is some sort of emergency message needed, the system Admin types it onto a admin ASP page and the object reads it and can speak the actual text (using the text to speech object built into Windows that few know about). So if there is some emergency, users can react to it more quickly.

DesktopX 1.1 won't be publicly available for some time yet. But 1.1RC1 is available on Object Desktop right now (www.objectdesktop.com). Object Desktop is where WindowBlinds, ObjectBar, WInStyles, IconPackager, etc. all are from.

https://www.stardock.com/products/desktopx/dx-feb02.jpg

With DesktopX 1.1, it won't be just pretty animated objects anymore. Now devleopers using their favorite scripting language will be able to easily interact with the COM objects on their desktop just like they would any other DesktopX object.

This is all on the road to what we're calling DesktopX NG where COM and DX objects are merged together completely and seamlessly.

That screenshot isn't a mockup, it's my desktop as of right now. The potential usefulness of this is unlimited. For example, Microsoft Instant Messenger is a set of COM objects. You could break it up into pieces and make your own skinnable IM in a matter of minutes if you know what you're doing.

The current version of WindowBlinds on ObjectDesktop.net is 3.19.

Here are some of the things it does that are of interest:

1) Global bitmaps. Can actually thank Gerhard for this one. WindowBlinds 3.1 and earlier loaded all the bitmaps on a per process basis. That is, when you load up Internet Explorer, WB would have to go and load up all the bitmaps associated with that skin. This is what we believe causes some people to feel WB makes their system "feel" sluggish. If one has a slow hard drive (or is using NTFS with compression on it) this can be a significant issue. This eliminates that problem and also makes switching skins much faster. This also makes it use fewer resources on Win98/ME. Bottom line, WB now loads apps faster than if using Windows XP's visual styles.

2) Full version now skins IE completely.

3) Start menu logoff/turn off buttons now skinned.

4) Tasks panel in explorer windows keeps XP look (we don't skin it yet, have to decide how we want to do it but it doesn't look like classic).

5) Misc video acceleration support (automatic).

6) Bunches of othre tweaks made for skin authors and for increased compatibility reasons.

7) Uses the XP visual style engine even more so now than previously.

There are some other things we're working on that may make it into 3.2, will keep you up to date.

Overall though, 3.2 should be a big win for Win98Frogboy users because of less ram and resources used. And for XP users, the performance advantages of WB over using XP's bundled visual styles should start becoming pretty overwhelming. Only thing left will be to add a few additional XP specific controls to skin and at that point WB will be a true superset of XP's visual styles that integrate seamlessly into XP but also extend it to take advantage of new hardware acceleration features and use far less memory (due to WB's skin format).

Over at the GUI Olympics we have an article that talks about Windows XP and how it affects customization. The article mainly sets out to explain what exactly is new in Windows XP.

This is an article I wrote that hopefully will help explain to non-XP users what Windows XP provides and why so many "skinners" love it.

What a wasted week this was. Between a snow storm, hard drive problems (spent today putting in new harddrives and reinstalling) and other issues, I didn't get very much done this week.

I'm going to just pretend this week didn't happen and start fresh on Monday!