One of the things that worries me about the skinning community is its occasional flirtation with elitism. I see this most pronounced with the treatment sometimes awarded to those who port skins from other platforms or programs. So I want to say it outright - porting skins is important too. Many skinners get their start porting skins in various forms.  Dangeruss's first skins were ports.  My first skins were ports.  Alexandrie's first skins were ports. And so were many others.

While SkinStudio does make it much easier to port certain skin formats than they otherwise would be, a proper port still requires quite a bit of work.  When someone ports a .msstyle to WindowBlinds there is still more work to be done. There's a lot of stuff in WindowBlinds that good ports have to add onto.  And that takes work.  It also takes work to go through and make sure everything is done quite right.  It's not as trivial as one might think.  I have ported quite a few skins to WindowBlinds that I liked on other platforms.  I know that since WindowBlinds runs faster and skins non-theme aware programs, that I want to run my visual styles on WindowBlinds.

We now have a check box that asks if a skin has been ported. So we can make sure such ports don't end up at the top of a contest or something. But otherwise, give some props to the people who help bring you skins. Don't discourage skinning in any form.

One of the big news items this week was the dual releases of Konfabulator 1.8 for Windows and DesktopX 2.3.  Konfabulator has definitely been winning the marketing war.  By implying that Apple's development of Dashboard prompted them to move to Windows, they were able to garner a great deal of mainstream media coverage. While untrue, that's not was got me. What's gotten my goat was the implication that Windows doesn't have something like Konfabulator. It does and has for years before Konfabulator existed on any platform.  Putting DesktopX aside for a moment, programs like Samurize, Kapsules, and Avedesk already exist, are free, have large followings, and aren't so obscure that the media should be unaware of them. 

What that will translate into I'm not sure.  The widget market is pretty saturated as-is.  I know what DesktopX's sales are. Whether the widget market is commercially viable in the long term remains to be seen. 

Well, that's about all I have time for right now.  I've got to help get ObjectDock 1.05 announced out there...