Stardock has released version 0.60 of ObjectBar onto Object Desktop. ObjectBar is a skinnable program designed to let users create their own Startbar alternatives. 0.60 is much easier to use, faster, and more stable.

On the side of my house there was a huge wasp nest this summer. They had literally dug a cave into the ground at the base of the house. It was quite impressive really.

My wife complained that I needed to do somethign about it. Every time we were on the deck, the wasps would be buzzing around us. Occasionally they'd get into our face and we'd wack one of them. A pinprick strike on them.

Last month, my 4 year old was getting the mail and when he opened the mailbox a wasp flew out and stung him on the arm. That was it. I knew at that point I had to do something about the problem.

The wasp nest by then was huge. I wish I had a picture of it to post. It was underground mostly and surrounded by bushes. But wish a shovel, anti-freeze, and a hose I went in there and eradicated them. I got stung in the process but I took care of the problem pretty thoroughly.

There are still wasps, but not nearly as many and not nearly as close to the house as they were. I obviously can't wipe out all wasps everywhere, but I was able to take care of the problem in a pretty decisive way. Now it's just a matter of keeping an eye out for new nests and making sure they don't get started. I was lucky, my son isn't allergic to wasp stings. My wife is though. The wasps didn't really bug me until I realized that they could really harm my family. If it had been my wife who had gotten stung it would have meant a trip to the hospital at the very least.

Terrorists are a lot like wasps. For the past 30 years we've been watching their nests but not really done much about them other than pinprick strikes. Now they've really stung us and we have to act. Because next time they may strike with much worse than a few airplanes.

We must find where they are and root them out. We must take preventative measures to change the enivironment that allows them to grow. We'll get stung some in the process but we must do our best to eradicate the problem on a sustained, long term, large scale.

Those of you who have given this subject some thought, what do you think the world community should do to solve this current problem?

http://scripts.wincustomize.com/skins.asp?TEST=JUNK&searchtext=Stars&library=1&sort=updatedate&order=Descending&image1.x=18&image1.y=14

Some people, mostly outside the United States believe that the US response is going to be a single or brief set of air strikes against some designated enemy. That is not the case.

There won't just be a strike. The United States is mobilizing for war as we speak. The government just activated the reserves today. There won't be a single strike, it is going to be a prolonged campaign that will likely take years.

Colin Powell yesterday basically set up the way it's going to work. Countries with terrorist training camps in them will be approached to eliminate the problem themselves. If they do not, the US will 1) Take care of the problem for them and 2) Move to replace the government with one more civilized.

I don't think people outside the US have grasped that the United States is not viewing this as a law enforcement problem, it is viewing this as a war. We're not talking some air strikes, we're talking sending in ground troops to either blockade or invade nation states that harbor terrorists.

And the nations that may have US and international invervention (remember, this isn't the US versus the world, this is the world versus a handful of rogue nations who aid and harbor terrorists) would be conquered and have their governments replaced much as what we done with Japan and Germany.

One foreign policy expert yesterday pointed out that the only way to win for the long term is to change the cultures of this countries. To de-fanatacize them. When the US occupied Japan and Germany, it turned them into peaceful countries right down to the culture.

If they had had the Internet in 1941, I doubt anyone here would guess that years later, Japan would have Japan Disney and Mickey Mouse being their favorite cartoon character. Japan Disney does more business than Disney World in Florida. Cocacola is their favorite soft drink. American pop stars are their favorite musicians.

This is what is being discussed. The only way to win this in the long haul is for us to turn these enemies of the United States into us. Us being Western Europeans/Americans.

And before you think such plans absurd or extreme, I merely point to history where it is exactly how the Allies handled World War II. We turned the Japanese and Germans into us. And the people are happier for it.

And again, before someone points out that one cannot turn these fanatics into us. Read up on Nazism. You can't get much more fanatical than the Hitler youth was.

These countries in the Middle east will have to either abolish terrorism on their own or they will face the international community's determination to forever eliminate not just the terrorists but the culture that breeds terrorism. Don't think it can't be done, it's been done before when it was far more daunting to do so.

Having been to the World Trade Organization on numerous occasions, I find myself completely stunned by the events. To imagine that gigantic building full of people simply gone is just horrifying.

At the same time, the civilized world seems to have come together to join the United States in what may become a coordinated crusade to eradicate terrorism. Such a thing seems impossible but consider this:

If the United States and the world community can retaliate in such sufficient force, then political terrorists will have to weigh their goals versus the inevitable response. History has shown that massive retaliation does work. As barbaric has it has been in history, it was an effective means of keeping terrorism under control. Terrorism has always been with us and will be. But perhaps if the proper response can be achieved, it can be seen in the same light that we see nuclear weapons, that terrorism is so horrible and the consquences of it so painful, that it won't be used as a political tool.

Of course, this all assumes that there was a political ends being sought in some sick way rather than simply pure madness.

NATO has activated article 5. This has never been done. This means that NATO considers what has occurred as an act of war. This means Germany, UK, France, Spain, Italy, Greece, etc. all consider this attack as an attack on themselves and will respond accordingly. It is unprecedented.

Whoever did this, wherever they are, I do not think they realize the whirlwind they have just sewn.

What do you think?

Please give a moment of silence for the victims of the the cowardly terrorists.

Stardock is making available a stand alone shareware version of the ObjectBar beta to WinCustomize supporters. Users who have purchased a T-shirt or CD or hat or whatever here will be receiving an email from WinCustomize with a link to download the shareware version.

It'll eventually be made available to the general public but this is a way of thanking those who are supporting the site financially.

If you already have Object Desktop, 0.60 will be available there too. 0.60 is a very radical change from previous versions of ObjectBar from a GUI standpoint. It's much cleaner and easier to use (And more stable).

ObjectBar has been designed with utility value as its highest concern. The fact that it can be made to look beautiful so easily is practically a miracle.

Looking at the attached screenshot, one gets an idea of how far ObjectBar has come.

Feature wise, it's got some great utilitarian features such as:

1) Bars can be hidden until you move your mouse to the edge of a screen at which point the bar can slide out.

2) Tear off menus

3) Complete and seamless system tray integration (far in advance of what is in DesktopX).

4) Very easy to modify themes. Many programs of this kind look great in a screenshot but are really hard to use. ObjectBar makes modifying bars and such easy, even for novices. It supports drag and drop throughout and has consistent, easy to use interface.

5) It uses what's in Windows as much as possible so that it's system independent. For instance, making a WinXP start bar? You can have it use your real quicklaunch so that no matter whose system it's on, it uses their quick launch.

6) Supports plugins and BandVWM objects. It and DesktopX share the same plugin architecture.

7) Generally designed to have the features from every wharf/dock/bar/center/whatever plus many of its own.

And if that wasn't enough, ObjectBar has arguably the most flexible skinning system ever developed.

Normally, one downloads a "theme" and they're pretty much stuck with whatever look it has. But in ObjectBar, skins are seperate from the bars. So you can actually, as a user, change the skin of the bars you've downloaded into skins you've made or skins from other themes. So let's say you download a MacOS bar (Finder bar at the top). But you like the Windows XP blue look. You right click on the bar, change its skin to be the Windows XP skin from an XP theme and suddenly it has a different look entirely.

For instance, I just changed the bar's skin from the original skin to use the dream skin by Dangeruss. Obviously the two themes were never aware that the other existed, that's how flexible ObjectBar is.

https://www.stardock.com/products/objectbar/ob-sept01a.jpg

ObjectBar is part of Stardock Object Desktop which is where DesktopX (which handles the desktop - anyone who thinks they compete has never tried to create a bar with DesktopX or a desktop with objectbar), WindowBlinds (which handles the GUI), IconPackager (the icons), and more. It's at http://www.objectdesktop.com.

First screenshots of WindowBlinds 3 released:

https://www.stardock.com/products/windowblinds/wb3/wb3-1.jpg

https://www.stardock.com/products/windowblinds/wb3/wb3-2.jpg

https://www.stardock.com/products/windowblinds/wb3/wb3-3.jpg

After months of development, Stardock is preparing to announce WindowBlinds version 3. WindowBlinds is a program that turns Windows into having a skinnable user interface. Version 3 is going to be based off of the beta of WindowBlinds XP.

The new version will be much smaller in size and require far less memory. On Windows XP, it integrates directly into Microsoft's visual style framework. On Windows 98/ME/2000, WindowBlinds will talk to a Stardock developed XP-like skinning engine. The goal is for it to be seamlessly part of the OS.

The other major feature of WindowBlinds 3 comes in the form of Smart Bars which allow users to add items themselves right into the title bar or borders of a window (such a MP3 player or stock ticker, or quick launch or whatever) rather than using a skin where the skin author happened to do that.

Stardock will be releasing WindowBlinds 3 in October. The betas will begin appearing on their Object Desktop network in about 2 weeks.

A white paper outlining the details of WindowBlinds 3 is available at:
https://www.stardock.com/products/windowblinds/whitepaper_wb3.html

I highly recommend checking out Crae's insightful article at Tek. It looks back on the world of skinning in the past year:

http://www.teknidermy.net/article.php3?title=25&issue=6&volume=1

I really enjoyed the article. Though I disagree with the view that things look bleak.

But I can see where he's coming from. The skin community is rapidly approaching a cross roads. Actually, an on-ramp may be a better analogy. The release of Windows XP is likely to completely put skinning into the mainstream. This is an anathema to those who like to see it as a cottage industry. Indeed, those who see small developers like Stardock as a threat to the cottage industry are really going to be up in arms as the millions of newbie skinners jump in once XP opens their eyes.

How do we measure the success of a skinning community? Most old timers have an exagerated memory of skinz.org. That was a site I loved. But being friends with Mian and Toasty, I also knew their traffic. In terms of community activity, DeviantArt dwarfs skinz.org (in terms of postings). In terms of actual skins being downloaded per day, WinCustomize does vastly more downloads per day than skinz.org did at its height and rougly and equal amount of message board traffic (in posts per day). And these sites are able to do that without completely dominating the community as skinz.org did.

Of course, back then it was a much smaller community. Skinz.org was the first professionally run no nonsense skin site. For those of you who don't know Mian and Toasty, they are both truly gifted. They..get it. They have an uncanny business sense of knowing what they need to do. They don't innovate, but they see a concept and they make it better and one of the results of their professionalism was skinz.org.

And while it did dominate, it wasn't as popular as DeviantArt or WinCustomize are today. Skinz.org had a total of 100,000+ registered users when it went down after nearly 2 years of being up. WinCustomize got 40,000 new registered accounts last month alone.

A news item on DeviantArt can get hundreds of users participating in it. Something that never would have or could have happened on skinz.org.

So in terms of the quantity of users, the skin community is growing. Perhaps what Crae sees as bleak is the loosening of the community -- it's not tight knit anymore. It's more splintered...more diluted. That I would agree with.