Skinnable Widgets

I would love to see if widgets would have the ability to use the current WindowBlind skin. I am not sure how hard it would be to implement, but it would make changing the overall-look of your desktop much easier.

In addition to that, having lots of skins for different Widgets would then be the ideal combination and would certainly give the people the freedom to customize their desktop individually. It would most likely require that Stardock creates the most common basic Widgets as some kind of "standard skeleton" for which the individual skins can be created, and that WC will have the ability to sort the skins by the widgets. Such a widget would then have a right-click menu allowing to choose between: "Use current WindowBlind" and "use other skin".

Carl (c242) put together a nice little framework a while ago for skinning some DX objects.

It's there for whoever wants to take a look.

I'd love to see somethign fleshed out.

My thought (expressed several times before) was to add into Skin Studio the ability to have images for weather, rss, clock, calendar, etc so that i could code a widget/gadget that used the correct images, and add the functionality i wanted it to have, then have the current WB skin (if it had the images in it) change the skin of my gadget/widget.

I have really fought to break out of the same old same old stuff, trying to make DX work in ways most people are not currently using, but its really hard. I think there is a major split in the skin/dx world over SKINNERS vs CODERS, rarely are there people who are good at both. I think having the ability to use the great looking images/graphics/skins that so many people here put out, on a brand new type of widget would be great.

I think having a seperate skinning program for DX is not a good idea, its one more things the "skinners" would need to learn how to use. Where if the major items (just look in the widgets gallery to see what they are) had base images, etc that could be implemented inside SS there would be a Wealth of new and great looking skins for DX widgets.

I think there is another issue as well, with my limited knowledge of Vista, i think there are going to have to be new widgets/gadgets created that FIT into the standard sidebar, and as i have not used vista all that much (yet) and have only played with some of my own items, i see a lot of size issues, and that would be something that skinning could help with.

I think the main problem with DX/widgets/gadgets is people think of them as throw-away apps, things they can turn on/off/ignore/etc. But what we have to move to are mini-programs that have skinning abilities. One that I have worked very hard on is the Holiday Countdown, it uses built-in images, but it also allows you to use your own images, and that was a major undertaking, but it is something that i think is really new for DX (maybe im missing things). We need to come up with widgets/gadgets that push the limits of what can be done, and in DX that limit is REALLLLLY out there. I have worked on some new things that use a lot of WMI calls (something i never used till about 2-3 mo ago), and the wealth of info in there is amazing. Just look at what VAD_M has done.. wow.

I look forward to DX4 and the new things there, DX is an amazing platform to work from to make some really great things.

I am still using it privately, but let's face it, the interest for it was so small (besides downloading it and do nothing with it according to the feedback I got)that I really decided to go on and do something better with my time. And the flood of weather objects still got on after it, which was something that widget should have helped with.

And none of the skinners and graphics artists did only 1 skin for it nor anyone asked about it out of blank interest, so... All in all it was a pretty disappointing experience for me. See, I didn't think I had reinvented the wheel or something, but I really thought to move something, if only to motivate others to do a similar thing. And this article (nothing negative) proofs that it was really a waste of time as nobody besides Zubaz seems to have noticed the idea behind it. Of course it is nowhere near to perfect (a large amount of that imperfection is the limits scripting alone and a lack of good plugins still have and some annoying DX bugs which have been reported here for ages), but it could have been developed further with more interest and also ideas from others.

Sorry to sound frustrated, but I think VadM and RomanDA (both greater widget makers and scripters than I will ever get) share that feeling sometimes.

Accourding the vista sidebar : It will never be able to compete with DX, as the widgets for it are far from perfection (Ever used a mail or another sidebar gaddget that needs an internet connection without connection ? Crash crash...) and it is also a ressource hog compared to DX or even DX gadgets. I have played arround with it when my vista was new and I quickly got back to DX.

Bud, im sorry, it was similar for some things i have tried as well.

The main problems with the current "crop"/"glut" of weather widgets is most use VERY old and VERY problematic code. There has been a lot of things implemented in DX that could fix a lot of these issues, but no one wants to bother doing it. I have seen some new weather widgets from Richard but to be honest i dont care, i have done the weather thing, and to be honest most things on my screen just get in my way.

I have asked for about 2 years (or more) to have a way to change the ICON that DX uses in the system try so that i could implement something like the weather bug where it has the temp in there. I think SD has really done an amazing job on the Object dock weather plug-in, its slick, it looks great, and it stays out of my way until i want it.

There needs to be a MAJOR shift in widgets/gadgets or they will not make it. We as a community of skinners/coders need to try and find things that i classify as indispensable, things you NEED, not just FLUFF. Thats why you have not seen a lot from me lately, I have some things i have been working on, but i have not uploaded for various reasons, but i have a few i want to put out there for everyone to mess with. (one might be coming today, tomorrow??). I have been working a lot out of town, and when im home im catching up on life. I have had several really good ideas sent to me but im not sure of my ability to make them happen.

I am not the best at coding, i know what i know, what i dont know, i google (yes zu, there you go i admit it, i LOOK THINGS UP!!, shocker!). But there is a lot that is way beyond my abilities.

I dont want to get off topic.. Most of my gripes have been documented over and over.

I can only imagine if there was no longer a need for 200 individual weather widgets. The only way a skinable widget would work well for me as a coder is if i can easily make use of the skin parts to make something new.

I could see being able to "skin" the flash card gadget or the Site Checker, as there isnt a ton to them graphics wize. I think its possible but we need to have some really good base widgets to work from and know what images/skins we can build from.

Ok, im losing myself now.. back to work.. must work.. must feed family..

I think it should be skinned like everything else.  Apply a skin and it gets skinned like everything else, or most everything.

I still think there have to be some work on the plugins also and proper use of existing plugins. There is an OCX Stardock uses for weather in paid suites, but noone ever saw any documentation for it (intended ?). Also it would be great to be able to have a scriptable media plugin and let the performance plugins react to scripts also for general easy tasks (like setting the drive for a hd meter) avoiding fiddling with WMI for beginners.

At the moment I would even be lucky if DX would not lose settings from persistent storage from time to time...

I gave up on that a while ago, and just have savesettings() and loadsettings() functions i made to write out to the reg and read from the reg. its a pain in the rear, but not much i can do.

Yeah, I used an ini for that purpose as I didn't want to fiddle with the registry.

I still hope this thread will have more life than this one which has some importand points in it but died pretty soon after it was posted.

I thought Carl had a cool idea going...didnt need it at the time so I never really looked into it.(I already had all the widgets I needed)

Ideally a skinnable widget would be like CerebroJD's skinnable WMP skin...it just grabs Windowblinds graphics and settings and even uses perpixel frames.Problem is he stopped werking on it.(The little bugger dosnt even respond to PM's)  

A skinable widget should require almost no user intervention other than checking off things they want displayed.(and have the widget resize accordingly)  

Skinnable widgets is a great idea. As it is now, the same widgets are used over an over again but with different images. So, basically that's what is going on now anyway. It would be much more convenient to be able to simply change the skin via a menu than to reload a new widget. Plus, why have so many copies of the same thing on your computer when you only need one?

There should be seperate skins for different types of widgets rather than having them being created in a universal format. I think the skins will look much better if they are designed specifically for a certain type of widget. Hopefully there would also be a way to move items around in the skin so they dont all look exactly the same. Something like an ini file where you can define the size, font, and placement of buttons and images.

The idea of using the existing WB skin, if possible, should be an option but only along with using the skins. The end user, although its hard to imagine, may not have WB installed. Plus, not everyone may want there widgets to look like window frames (Assuming that is how it would work).

It would also be nice if the "base widgets" were released with permission to reuse the code. That way if someone wanted to create something a little bit different from the norm they could. Like making a combo widget by combining one or more widgets into one. For example: a calendar / weather widget, or grouping several widgets together into a sidebar like dock. Or if they were capable, they could add features that were not included in the base widget.

c242- for what its worth, I think your solution would have worked fine if skinners would have adopted it. But like you pointed out, the weather widgets kept flooding in and the only skins available were the ones you submitted. Which, by the way, all look great.

I sort of agree with separate skins for different types of widgets but, I'm just wondering if some sort of plugin ability wouldn't be easier. For example in the standard right click menu the user would have the options of "default skin" or "Windowblinds UI"?

My main issue with the different "base" type widgets/gadgets is the restrictions that would be placed on design. What's to happen when someone designs a non-rounded rectangle widget/gadget?

So the idea is that there will be this one Stardock weather widget and it will pull images from a WB skin. In addition, skinners will be able to make skins for this widget following a basic platform. Instead of thousands of weather widgets we get thousands of weather widget skins.

I just have alot of questions for anyone who has an idea:

Are we proposing that there will be a seperate gallery for widget 'skins'?
What if we don't have WB? Would it also be able to pull images from a DX theme?
What about design? Most of the weather widgets are in the same 'window' or 'box' fashion. Supposing a skinner wanted to make a skin in other odd shapes and sizes; arranging the buttons, images etc in different ways. Would pulling images from a WB work with that? Would it recognize that the close button goes in the bottom right corner,the temperature goes in the top left, the now weather image goes in the middle, and the 5-day is arranged vertically?
Would the skinning process be anything like Xion where each image must be named the correct keyword so the DX widget will know which image to apply to what?


Supposing there is this one weather widget and I make a DX theme. What exactly would I include instead of a weather widget? A package of images?


Finally, can we really make people stop duplicating weather widgets if that's what they choose to do? I'd imagine somewhere down the line someone will make a better more efficient weather widget and will want to upload that instead of the UniversalSkin weather widget.

You can call it ' flooding ' all you want but the bottom line is people downloaded the weather widgets.

They come looking for matching elements to a windowblind , they want to download it and open it and move on to the next thing. Personally I don't care if my widget matches my windowblind..but, the public does. So do you skin for yourself or do you give the public what they come here looking for?

You have RightClick program that skins using the current windowblind, but sometimes the skin looks terrible. The default skins of RC are pretty boring most of the time so how are you going to get windowblinds to skin a weather widget so they all don't look boring?

Good luck if you can do it.

I used the word flooding simply because it was the terminology introduced in post #5. I wasn't intending to imply something negative, I thought it was referring to the quantity.

That’s why I think it would be convenient for people to have just one widget that they could right click on and quickly choose a new skin. Kind of like changing a skin in rainlendar. Of course the skins wouldn’t necessarily have to match a WB and could take on any design the artist creates.

I made a skinnable gadget version of XXCalc a while ago. Without a Pro version I won't release it.

Otherwise setting a skinnability standard is pretty tough. Maybe some generic stuff such as font colors, certain standard stuff like buttons, etc.

I didn't mean to single you out on that - its just that the person that made 90% of the weather widgets wrote on their last widget they would no longer upload to WC , I have no idea why she left but it did seem a shame that her work was regarded as ' flooding' when people did in fact download tons of her stuff.


Not sure it would be the same as a Rainlendar...each rainlendar 'skin' is totally different size and set up ( hopefully )

A rainlendar takes twice as long to make than a widget. But Rainlendars seem to be a dying breed..

Maybe widgets are just going the same direction. The novelty type widgets have run their course.