On this month's Stardock TV we look at DirectGUI in action, the first week of
the GUI Olympics, IconX, and how to make widgets!
The first week of the GUI Olympics has concluded. We're just getting
started and the winners were from teams SkinPlant which leads the medal count
with 3 medals, team Pixtudio with 2 medals and last year's returning champion,
deviantART with 1 medal.
Some outstanding entries this year have made it incredibly hard for the
judges to decide amongst them. They were all very very close in ratings.
The first two events both were in the
WindowBlinds visual styles. Stardock
has been also taking notes on how skin authors are creating skins. As skinning
has gotten more powerful, it's gotten more complex and that complexity can
translate into weird graphics glitches as minor bugs crop into skins.
Stardock has spent the past couple of weeks looking closely what bugs are
common. For example, most skin authors don't set their caption height (misc:
skin metrics: caption height) which is supposed to be the same height as the
title bar. Some programs make use of that metric to decide how large their title
bars and child window title bars should be.
Take a look below to see video demos of the top skins in action.
DirectGUI in action!
Meanwhile, DesktopX 2.2 entered into beta with a whole new Direct GUI
underpinning. DirectGUI is really the power behind DesktopX. With it, all kinds
of visual functionality can be added to the Windows desktop that can be
controlled by programs and scripts.
We've got lots of interesting demos of that in action.
That wasn't the only place the DesktopX got to strut its stuff. Here's a
guide on how you can make your own widgets for DesktopX. It's incredibly
easy. Just draw out what you want your widget or program to look like with a
paint program, save it, and load the saved image up into a DesktopX object and
off you go. Check out how easy it is here:
Speaking of DesktopX, one of the coolest features about it is IconX. Check
out this mini-video of it
in action.
On the horizon...
WindowBlinds 4.3 is now out there and
SkinStudio 4.3 is just about
done. SkinStudio 4.3 has two major new features in it over 4.2.
First, it takes advantage of changes in WindowBlinds 4.3 so that msstyles can be
imported into WindowBlinds as native WB visual styles. Secondly, it makes
it easy to export progress animations and toolbar icons which will help launch
the upcoming WinCustomize.com sections
for those two things.
We'll also be showing how easy it is to actually create a skin these days
with SkinStudio with a video tutorial of how to do it and some tips and tricks
on how to make your skin more reliable and compatible on people's computers.
We also have a preview of ObjectBar 2 coming up along with ObjectDock Plus,
BootSkin Plus (true color version), and more.
Stay tuned!
 Take
your system to the next level with Object Desktop! Winner of the 2004 PC
Magazine Editor's Choice Award for Best Utility of its kind.
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