With DesktopX 2.0 out, I've been having a lot of fun playing around making all kinds of silly things. There's really nothing quite like DesktopX out there in the sense that it makes creating things very very easy.

Let me show you something I sent to my mom today to illustrate my point. We got a cute picture of the 3 year old sleeping on the floor. My mom really likes the picture. But rather than just emailing her a picture of him (which I also did), I decided to put something together that she could have on her desktop.

Here's how I did it:

Step 1: I loaded up the photo in Corel Photopaint. Using the "magic wand" tool I selected just Ryan.

Step 2: So now I have just Ryan there selected. I just save this (with the mask) as a .PNG file.

Step 3: So I go over to the DesktopX system tray item and choose "New Object". Which creates the ugly generic blue object. I then clicked Change on the default image.

Step 4: I picked my Ryan PNG file.

Step 5: He's too big right now. It shows all my little errors in my selection too. So I change the size down to be much smaller. I also clicked on the shadow tab and gave him a shadow.

Final result. Notice how well DesktopX scaled the image. It smoothed it out and it requires no extra CPU to do that (except for a few micro seconds when you hit the apply button of course).

I also assigned it later to open up Internet Explorer when you double click on it (so that at least it did something besides sit there).

Yea, I know, this kind of thing is useless in most ways but it's pretty darn neat and fun. I'm going to make a photo album for the grandmas where each month a different picture of our kids shows up. That will only take a few minutes to do too.

Because I'm using DesktopX 2 Pro, I can export these objects as stand-alone programs so they don't even have to have anything else installed. We plan to let DesktopX 2.01 users of the registered version (the $20 one) be able to export as EXEs too but they'd require DesktopX to be installed on the machine. A subtle but important difference.

So there's my fun with DesktopX for the day.