Frogboy - If you don't see the innovation and new things going on, then my answer to that is that you're probably not trying out new software very much.
*engage pet rant mode*
one case of a new innovation in skinning was / is the smartbuttons that WB3.x introduced.
on paper the idea was, and is, very interesting.
so you can present this as a step forward for the skinning programs.
but i could count the number of released skins using smartbuttons on the claws of one paw. this "innovation" hasnt been picked up by the skin creators. when the first smartbutton enabled versions of WB were shipped, there were no sample skins showing how to do this that could be reverse engeneared.
at the time starone and i spent many hours producing a rather large thread here trying to work out smart buttons, and to get them to work without crashing WB and notepad. nothing wrong with working it our ourselves, but doing it with nothing to reverse engeneer is a different matter.
in fact i am under the impression WB still doesnt ship with any examples of how to use smartbuttons. not exactly encouraging people to use the new and innovative features of the programs.
*end pet rant mode*
Frogboy - 3) ObjectBar 1.3 allows users to have hot keys for any bar or item.
to my way of thinking, something that fiddlers will love and adore (well, *i* do), but since these are likely to be user specific, not something that is going to spread. also, setting them up is likely to stump total beginners.
i have been using OB since ver 0.4, and when i first got OB 1.3 installed i couldnt work out how to set up hotkeys to launch an application, and concluded that it wasnt possible.
i only worked it out after re-visiting the issue.
Frogboy - 4) ObjectBar 1.3 now lets you put in ActiveX controls right into bars!
at the risk of being harsh, how much use is this to the average user of skinnable programs?
for power users setting up custom environments this sort of this is ideal, but one persons custom setup probably isnt going to work well for other users. this power in DX doesnt seem to be used in most theme uploads, so is probably going totaly untapped by most users.
i agree that the more powerful a program is, the more complex it becomes to use that power. this is why a set of interesting examples that the user can download and play with are so useful. after all a picture is worth a thousand words, and they go a fair way towards providing useful documentation since skinners can pick them appart to see how to use these features themselves.
changing tack slightly:
in the time i have been using WB, i can see why people would say that the "golden age" has ended.
so many of the new skins that appear have a "it all looks the same" feel about them.
i am not sure that this is fair, since the number of new and seriously different skins has always seemed low. remember the time when we couldnt move for aqua skins?
but with the increasing upload rate, it just seems more obvious.
if you assume the same number of really different looking skins appearing, then they are becoming an ever smaller proportion of the total set of new skins.
