As the new year approaches, we’re starting to look forward to the DesktopX 4 beta.

So what are the goals of it?  Well, to be honest, the goals are pretty modest: Strip out the parts that are difficult to work with and build it back up.

Stripping it down

First off, DesktopX comes with several plugins that I have asked to be removed:

Any plug-in that doesn’t work on Windows 7 with UAC on would be removed.  The existing DesktopX library would be renamed “DesktopX legacy” and only new creations would be supported.

The source code for our plugins would be made public so that the community could take over their development since, unfortunately, there just aren’t enough development resources available these days to work on such things.

If users wanted to use that code to make weather and other types of plugins to make it easier for people to create new gadgets, that would be great.

The Future: Building it up

Instead, what I would like to see would be Python to be adopted as the means to creating “plugins” that DesktopX could then read in.  Essentially, DesktopX scripting would move to Python and away from JScript or VB Script.

You could still use other scripting languages as well but we would move away from VB Script being the default.

Clicking on the “New” Script would open up the user’s default editor associated with DesktopX (preferably a python editor).

For 4.0

But for 4.0, we’re looking to clean it up. Fix long-standing issues and get to a more solid foundation from which to build on with Windows 7 being the focus for future development.