Welcome to the skinning blog group! If you already have a blog on JoeUser and are interested in sharing your thoughts and ideas on the world of skinning, click here to join this blog group. If you don't already have a blog, get one, it's free and fun! Just create an account if you haven't already done so and then in the account tab at the top you can do it there.So today I decided to try out two new DesktopX "ability extensions" (plugins). The first one makes it a snap to get some basic info on...

Ever have one of those days when you're extremely busy but you don't seem to get very much done? I got back from my trip and my todo list is huge.  The trip seemed to go well but won't know for a few weeks still but now I'm left with tons of things to do. DesktopX We were supposed to go out with a new public DesktopX build. DesktopX is going to be great...when it gets the bugs out. I ran into so many buglets today that I had to kill today's public beta announcement which is a bummer bec...

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...

Lot of cool stuff going on with SkinStudio. The newest internal builds allow you to create your own icons.  Now, I haven't created a serious icon since the OS/2 days. Awhile back I started looking into icon editors and it turns out these icon editors are incredibly expensive. Why? Well because they include a whole load of image editing features. But why? Why try to compete with Photoshop and Corel Draw? If I'm going to create a modern icon, I'm not going to use some icon editor's graphic...

What is a skin site? A skin site is a kind of file download site.  The world's most popular download site, Download.com, is ranked 47th in the world by Alexa. The kind of bandwidth it must take to run that site is astronomical. Last week, the most popular file on Download.com received over 2.3 million downloads (Kazaa).  WinZip, the most popular ZIP manager, received 426,000 downloads. Skin sites don't get anywhere near that kind of traffic. It specializes in files that are used to c...

Today was the second day of the Professional Developer's Conference (PDC) where Microsoft is showing off some of the technologies that will make up the next version of Windows code-named Longhorn (due out in 3 years). And there's some really exciting stuff from a developer's point of view. There's so much to digest that it's hard to get handle on exactly what all the goals are. This is my interpretation of events but I think they're pretty on target in this case.  Microsoft is moving...

PDC, for Professional Developer's Conference, is designed for developers (i.e. nerdy people like me). It's where Microsoft is going to show off the cool stuff that it has in store for developers in the coming years. What I'm going to try to do is explain what is happening and how it affects regular users. The things being shown today will one day be things everyone has to live with. Today was the first day.A lot of what was shown today at PDC is hard to describe since it was so visually oriented...

Log of Microsoft/Neowin/Stardock chat regarding PDC and Longhorn.. On the last day of the Microsoft Professional Developer Conference, Stardock's Brad Wardell, Jed and Jana from Microsoft and Creamhackered from Neowin hosted a Neowin.net live chat to answer questions and provide information on Longhorn, the next version of Windows due out in 2006. Introduction: [Brad Wardell] This week is PDC. This is a show where Microsoft is showing off the big technologies in Longhorn. [Brad Wardel...

Every week I'm going to try to find cool things from around the web and share with you. On the computer, my favorite thing to do is skinning. Or more to the point, I really like to tweak up Windows XP to match my own insane way of doing things. The best way to do that is with Object Desktop . Not just because my employer makes it but because it really is the best way to do this sort of thing. Another good program to have is CursorXP. It has a freeware version if youw ant to give it a try at ...

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 sh...

Been having a lot of fun at work lately. Very busy but still incredibly fun.  For one thing, been working on a bunch of different programs at once. Namely: DesktopX and DesktopX Pro IconDeveloper WindowBlinds 4.2 Today I discovered the joy of combining Flash and DesktopX together. Holy cow can you do some neat stuff. I took a Flash Tetris game and turned it into a DesktopX object. I also made a movie of my desktop for this month. Here's a screenshot of it: ...

Today I found another really cool use for IconDeveloper. I am in the process of writing up documentation for Object Desktop. As any technical writer will tell you, the useage of icons in a technical document to highlight key points is critical to creating clearly understood directions. But how to do that? Microsoft Word wouldn't let me. IE won't load them correctly for some reason. The built in Windows XP viewer didn't work.  But...But... IconDeveloper would open them. So I just do...

If you have DesktopX you can now make use of this cool JoeUser reader object. Just sits on your desktop, updates every 10 minutes with the latest main pages blog entries. Get it here .

Over as OSNews.com they linked to my article on the PDC.  OSNews.com is one of my favorite sites but it tends to have more than its fair share of "Wannabes". That is, developers who are probably pretty good but exceed their reach by making software development judges beyond their experience. Linux users in particular fall prey to this. But it's not that specific to a platform. What amazes me is how Linux/Apple advocates try to put down what Microsoft is trying to do with Long...

I'm so excited! So much cool stuff is going on! DesktopX 2 is nearly done, SkinStudio 4 and Icon Developer are coming, and WindowBlinds 4.2 is in the wings. WindowBlinds 4.2? WindowBlinds 4.2 is going to allow people to load up their own IE and Explorer toolbar icons along with replace those ugly progress dialog animations that have hung around since the Windows 95 era.  When you download a file or delete a file or copy something you get that old animation of files moving to a folder or ...