Frogboy's Desktop: July 2003

Over at Neowin I've started a desktop of the month video. I'm not sure how well it'll catch on, it's an extension of the screenshot of the month concept.

Here's mine from July: https://www.stardock.com/video/frogboy-july03.wmv

Here's what I'm doing in this video:

1) Been working a lot on DesktopX version 2. Those of you who like making scripts and such (VB Script, Javascript, etc.) are going to love DesktopX 2. We're going to have a free public beta shortly of it. In here, I have a bunch of fish objects that use a single page of VBscript code to control the fish.

DesktopX handles all the visual stuff so you only have to worry about the "guts" of the logic and just use PNGs for the graphics (or use a chart object or drawing object and have it handle the drawing).

2) Then I also got the final internal build of Keyboard LaunchPad 1.0. It's a program that lets you assign hotkeys to different pages. To get to WinCustomize I hit Ctrl-Alt-W and to go to Neowin, I jsut hit Ctrl-Alt-N. It also lets you save clipboard states to as hot keys too. So I have various Stardock logos, sigs, etc. saved as hotkeys that I can then use when I'm writing a document or posting or whatever. Stardock's tech support is moving to using Keyboard LaunchPad for canned replies.

3) And then finally I was playing around with a new build of SkinStudio. The newest builds let you take msstyles and bring them into the new Universal Skin Format that anyone can then write converters to various formats that they choose. We've written converts to take USF and make it into Media Player skins and WindowBlinds skin. So that msstyle skin you have you can convert to a Media Player skin (you choose a template or create your own template to control the layout and it then uses your msstyle or WB or whatever graphics for the buttons, borders, etc.).

This stuff is on Object Desktop. To get Object Desktop go to www.objectdesktop.com (http://www.objectdesktop.com).

So that's what I've been doing mostly this month.