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 ...

So today we released a new product called DesktopX Professional. It's $499 and what it does is allow you to create relatively small applications incredibly quickly. Creating software has a significant overhead attached to it. If you wanted to, for example, to create this clock here with say Visual Studio.net how long would it take you to write it? Well, writing something that tells the time wouldn't be hard. But about the actual clock? As you can see, it has a shadow under it, the edges ...

I uploaded two new suites today. Just putting the finishing touches on Object Desktop 2004 . The guys at the office have been working incredibly hard. Poor Kris has been burning the midnight oil trying to resolve a bunch of different things. For example, WindowBlinds 4.2 just doesn't work well yet on Windows 98/ME. The main problem is that those two OSes are total shit. We should have just said "No WB 4 on Win98/ME". But we promised to support it and we're suffering beca...

Paul got his Christmas Time Suite done. The frustrating thing is that WinCustomize is pokey due to the decrease in available hardware from the recent server crashes. This has affected JoeUser a bit too but not nearly to the level WC has been affected. So we've started a subscription drive to try to buy some new hardware. The goal is to get 500 people to buy premium WC subscriptions. It's a really good deal for all the stuff you get. But even if you didn't get that stuff, it's amazing how m...

Today was the 4th and final day of the Microsoft Professional Developer's Conference in LA. If you were there, things were a lot quieter than previously. Most sessions had to do with creating software with all the new goodies. There's a myriad of new techs to make it both easier for the developer and more convenient for the user with regards to software. There's what I believe was called "One-Click" which, all hype around it is really about trying to make it much cleaner to use software on yo...

If you want to change the way Windows looks and feels (the GUI) the main way to do that is with WindowBlinds . But some people on Windows XP have found that if their hack their uxtheme.dll they can apply additional msstyles, a basic skinning format made by Microsoft to handle the blue/silver/olive visual styles. So some users have managed to put together some nice msstyles. Most visual styles made are for WindowBlinds, but if you do manage to come across an msstyle on some site, you can now...

For fun, last night I started putting together my own iTunes like desktop.  I used Object Desktop . Object Desktop is a suite of several programs that allow you to totally customize Windows. There were 4 programs from Object Desktop that I used together to create this not counting ObjectDock (at the very top). First, I made use of ObjectBar. ObjectBar is one of the lesser known Object Desktop components. It currently suffers from a severe case of featuritis. Let me explain: ...

So you want to create icons eh? In the bad old days, creating icons was quite a pain. Probably the best thing that's happened to PC icon creation is Windows XP. That's because Windows XP supports alpha channels in its icons. Alpha channels allow for icons to anti-alias themselves. Or put another way, they don't look so blocky because the edges can blend in to your wallpaper or the folder background or whatever. This has been a boon to both professional and amateur icon authors.  Previou...