The Windows Media Player team still just doesn't get it.  Or maybe they get it but their managers don't. I'm playing around with Windows Media Player 10 tech beta and it still has the basic flaws that every skinnable version of media player has had: It can't decide what it wants to be.

Is it a regular Windows app or a custom one? Wow, two title bars on one app. And it's still confusing to a dumb guy like me how to actually select the skin. It should be way more obvious and those skins should affect the main app as well.

I keep finding myself back with iTunes even though it's technically not skinnable because at least it knows what it is. And as a practical matter though, it IS skinnable. 

If you have the DesktopX 2.2 beta (available to those who have Object Desktop) just download the widget and you can just run it as a regular program.  This is the part of DesktopX Stardock needs to really beat into people -- widgets don't have to be run as part of the DesktopX environment.  You can install DesktopX and NEVER run it. You can just load up widgets like any other program. The widget infrastructure in DesktopX is pretty ingenious, it works basically as if you installed an OS upgrade framework. It's more akin to the .NET framework except it's much smaller and more targeted and has no overhead and it doesn't throw anything into your Windows directories. It's very self-contained. That will be the drum we'll be beating loudly when DesktopX 2.2 comes out.  DesktopX widgets are EXEs. You run them like any other program.

Meanwhile the WinCustomize V4 stuff is coming along.  At launch, each WinCustomize subscribers will be able to activate a home page. Amongst all the other goodies such as being able to upload personal images (albums) the site will track all kinds of stuff for users.  Eventually Object Desktop users will also be able to activate home pages once we roll it out (i.e. having a WinCustomize domain will become part of the benefits for having an Object Desktop subscription as well but at first it'll be available only for WC subscribers).  WinCustomize subscribers will get personal libraries to upload many more personal images. 

Here are some of the incidentals:

Basically we will be doing a lot to try to give kudos to people who contribute to the community.  As you can imagine, all these statistics and other technologies will require a lot of horse power. Which is why subscribers will get first crack at using all this and why we're doing it all in .NET.  The development team has come up with a sort of multithreaded architecture for WinCustomize 4's .NET portions.  For instance,  normally when something gets uploaded or changed you have to wait for everything to be saved before continuing.  Now, the site will come back to you instantly while it does its work in the background.  We won't have the forums in .NET right away but that'll be where you'll see the benefit the most.  Well, that's not really true, the biggest places you'll see it is in commenting on skins.

You'll notice that there's a lot of kudos for people who comment on skins.  Those will come in the form of commenting points.  Moderators will have the ability to tweak those points (i.e. if someone is spamming the system we'll be able to tweak it or if someone leaves really high quality comments we can boost their points too but in either case it'll only be in extreme cases, we won't generally be touching points ourselves but rather letting the system do its job).

The look of the site is going to be totally different than it is today (and that screenshot isn't necessarily what it will look like).  Paul Boyer and the rest of the Stardock graphics design team are going to mockup what they imagine the perfect steam-lined but aesthetically pleasing looking content intensive site would look like and then the coders will run with it. BTW, for those who made it this far, as a little sneak peek, IconX is available.

Meanwhile, in the personal tech support area, in IE, my edit menu item is grayed out even though I use Front Page as my editor. No idea why it's no longer working but definitely very annoying. If anyone has any ideas (and I've checked in tools-options and Front Page is associated) comment here please.