sViz

Join Date 04/2006

+508

Discovering Desktop X: What’s your story?

It started with Windows Blinds…..

"What? So, my personal style is NOT limited to the proverbial Windows blue, silver, and olive green?!? Show me the colors!!!"

Bright colors, bold colors, dark and moody colors! Sleek styles, playful styles, professional, and trendy styles….

"Creative freedom at last! Take that Microsoft with your olive greens!"

But wait, there’s more….

"You mean I can make cool skins too?! Show me the Skin Studio!!!"

Weeks later…..

"Okay, it’s been weeks and I’m still only on this darn start menu! There are waaaaay too many things to customize."

Little icons and buttons disabled and enabled, checked, unchecked, in focus, out of focus. Fonts styles, font sizes, font colors, borders, headers, scroll bars, scroll buttons, on and on and on and on……

"That’s it; I’m in way over my head. How do these guys on WinCustomize do this? This is not for me."

The months pass….

Heading back to WinCustomize (on a strictly-wallpapers basis), I browse the aisles. "Say, whatever happened to that guy that made aqua fruit? Those were neat."

Then like a kid in a candy store, I began to wander….

"What is all this about objects, and docks, and widgets, and gadgets?"

Clocks, calendars, disk meters, weather meters, animated things, things that do nothing but look cool on your desktop!

"OOOOOOH! AAAAHHH! Show me DesktopX!!"

I cleared my desktop from all boring shortcuts and links, downloaded several widgets, loaded them up and marveled at all the different desktop themes. After a while I actually take the time to read through the Developer’s Guide.

"Hmm, this seems easy enough to use. Maybe I can take a whack at it?"

1 month of steady work and fast learning ensues. Photoshopping, tga files, bitmaps, animations (without Aniutil, thank you) ,vbscipting, testing and re-testing, tweaking revising, reading and re-reading tutorials, getting frustrated and confused, thinking and re-thinking, finally ……… *drum roll*…………………
Ta da!!--- My First Gadget

"WHEW! That was more difficult than I thought! But, man, I love making widgets! They’re so much fun to use."

What can I accomplish next? Stay tuned.

My first gadget was BIG. Took up too much space on my desktop and I rarely used it. I’ve made vast improvements since then.

It’s probably been asked a million times before but, what’s your story how’d you come to love DesktopX?

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I'd been to WinCustomize several times, having found it through the former DeskMod site, which featured some pretty neat skinnable software. I saw DesktopX, and even played with it a bit (see my "Knotty Bits" lol ), but I was more into Rainlendar and Beatnik.

I made some truly terrible Rainlendar and Beatnik skins, which I wisely never relesed to the public (like sViz's widget, my first projects always turned out HUGE for some reason [Still an issue for that matter]). Then I got into ObjectDock skins and docklets, SysStats based in particular, and began to get a bigger sense of the concepts involved.

Then one day I was surfing deviantArt and saw a thumbnail of what looked like a totally whacked out media player skin. It had a gigantic yellow Play button that was a full 80% the size of the entire skin, and I could tell it lacked many of the other buttons one would expect in a media player.

Intrigued I looked closer, and found that it wasn't actually a media player skin, but concept-art for a "winamp skin" that would be of help to intervenor professionals assisting people with limited mobility. The creator, Niall Brown, was seeking assistance in getting such a thing actually made and working. I expressed some interest in the form of a comment on the deviation, and said that I thought what he needed was not a Winamp Skin, but a media player widget, and that probably DesktopX would be the best choice for creating it. This was before anything (that I was aware of) made for Kapsules, Konfabulator, Avedesk, etc. even approached the complexity level that would be involved. Plus, DesktopX Pro would let you create a standalone executable, which would be required for the final project to be distributed to educators and intervenors.

I also said at that time that I knew nothing else about DesktopX except that it might be the ticket. But Niall and I continued to communicate, and I found myself really wanting to help with the project, and to do it as well as possible. Niall impressed me by sending me a prototype based on his concept art just a couple days after I had given him the link to WinCustomize and _Martin_'s email.

But the prototype, based on dxplayer and taking advantage of some DX behavior anomalies I now consider bugs, simply was too fragile to survive export as a gadget.

So I decided to try and tackle it as a Windows Media Player based gadget, designed from the bottom up to be a stand-alone gadget, stable, and most importantly of the most use possible to its intended audience. Which turned out to be non-trivial.

I spent months learning to script and drowning in the MSDN doms, making my first real widget, The Hardest Button to Button, and several side projects along the way. But one day Niall wrote me and said, "I think we have it" I was done. The Single Switch Media Player was complete.

...and I was hooked.

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sViz

Join Date 04/2006

+508

That's a great story Rabid, and the Single Switch Media Player is an amazing widget. Beautifully designed and easy to navigate.

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aww shucks.

I was hoping others might also have some interesting DX discovery stories...

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RomanDA

Join Date 12/2003

+147

I have not had time, nor been around.. and im not sure i can remember that far back.. LOL

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BigDogBigFeet

Join Date 12/2005

+461

My story is different from those presented. I'm not much of an author. I can't sing. I'm not much of an artist. But, what I can do is tinker. If something intrigues me, I dig into it to see how it works. I ask lots of questions of others when my learning involves others or of myself. Pulling things apart and putting things back together you might call it. So since I've only had OD for almost a year my first exposures were to DX themes.

At first I just downloaded a few DX themes not knowing much about WinCustomize and how libraries were organized, and initially, my choices for downloads weren't too informative. But as time went on, I learned more how to visit personal web pages and, from this, how to identify authors. WinCustomize has lots of visual cues to assist in this discovery process (Top Authors and Top Skins for example). Eventually I discovered gefs, Martin's and Boxxi's work. I began to customize gefs Minimalism for my own use and I was hooked as they say. DesktopX is without question the best object oriented programming environment (without the need for much programming) available. There is nothing else which evens comes close.

In comparison, I have also downloaded MS's free Visual Studio product and the programming requirements are too great. Hence, for me, the learning curve to become modestly adept is too steep with Visual Studio. DesktopX is a breeze in comparison. And the graphics capabilities and ease of implementation of concepts to working theme or widget as the case may be, far superior. DesktopX with the large library of finished works is a complete package. Learning from others is basic to human abilites and human satisfaction. So Stardock has clearly worked with and developed what its customers were telling it that they valued about Object Desktop. Good work everyone.

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ZubaZ

Join Date 11/2001

+917

DesktopX is without question the best object oriented programming environment (without the need for much programming) available.

Quote that!

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sViz

Join Date 04/2006

+508

Thanks for sharing, BigDogBigFeet!

DesktopX is without question the best object oriented programming environment (without the need for much programming) available.

Spot on! I tried to get into Visual Studio and my brain nearly exploded.

DesktopX is just so much easier and the possibilities are only limited by your imagination.

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I love DX. I have authored a few themes and objects, but not many, and not in a couple of years. I started running it when it was still VDM, right after Startdock bought it ('99 or 2000?) and have been using it since. It's just one of those programs that I can't live without.

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