DesktopX is shaping up much better and I think we'll be able to have that public build today (fingers crossed).

Today me and Paul Boyer (Mormegil) worked on a bunch of little DesktopX objects. Actually, what happened is that he made a really cool set of objects and then let me use his Corel Draw file (he uses Corel Draw for his art needs -- not 3D Studio as many believe) and I went forward and tweaked them to make individual objects.

The kinds of objects I wanted to start with were ones that display information like CPU usage, drive info, clocks, network traffic, etc.  So I put that together and started uploading them over to the WinCustomize library.

Making objects in Corel Draw rather than Photoshop is an insight that Paul Boyer gave me. Holy cow does it make life easier.  DesktopX objects have so many advantages over the various stand alone meter and monitoring apps. For one thing, DesktopX objects support alpha blending. This means no jaggies around the edge. And Corel Draw makes that really easy. When I export as a .PNG it auto creates the alpha channel so that my objects never have jaggies.

Example of what Paul's project looked like

So things are coming together. They don't have IconX able to support multiple monitors. Hopefully that will be in next week's build. But the more egregious bugs have been addressed. I still have some crashing now and then which needs to be addressed but it's getting better. Hopefully we'll finally get this out next month!