Brad's Friday Night Skinning Blog Entry

So I'm hanging out on the various skin sites like I always do and it hit me. We're boring. We suck. Where's the heart? The problem isn't that we're boring and heartless. It's just that it's easier to just post news. So that's it. I'm done. I'm going to try to occasionally write a skinning blog item here on WinCustomize and just talk about cool computer customization.

DesktopX stuff

This week was E3 which is the big game show. I normally got to it but I'm too busy finishing up The Political Machine and Galactic Civilizations: Altarian Prophecy to go. Part of that is negotiating contracts. What a pain those are.

Anyway, why am I mentioning games? Because in our games, particularly The Political Machine, the entire game interface is done with DesktopX. That's right, the game reads in .dxpacks.

We use DesktopX to actually put it all together and then the game, using DirectX 9, reads them in and puts them on the screen.

Think about it. DesktopX lets you deal with .PNG files that can be positioned relative to other "objects" with full alpha blending. Different states can be used. Font information is in there, etc.  It allows us to build these screens much much faster than we otherwise should. And they look so good.  The Political Machine will be at a store near you later this summer.

Speaking of DesktopX, I made a video of how easy it is to create stuff with it.  We're about to release a product called Impression Creator that is basically DesktopX Pro with a different name to target software developers.  Know those incredibly ugly Auto-run programs? The ones that come up when you put the CD in? That's the first impression a program gives you. Most companies, particularly smaller ones, don't have time to develop something nice. But imagine with DesktopX Pro, er I mean "Impression Creator" a company could create a really slick menu program in literally minutes. I put one together in this video.

We put up a new build of DesktopX 2 tonight. It's still in beta. The whole graphics engine is being redone.

Not that most people even realize this. People go crazy that Microsoft showed off a build of Longhorn that has shadows and transparencies and transitions! Wow! Amazing. It's not like WindowFX has done this for the past 3 years.  And now that DesktopX is giving Windows the kind of abilities that Mac users get with Quartz combining with what XAML in Longhorn will be able to do (DesktopX will even support XAML eventually) do you think that DesktopX will get that kind of coverage? Obviously not. It was probably a mistake to ever have a version of DesktopX at $19.95, people see the price and think it's a toy. They don't realize that under DesktopX is DirectGUI, the world's most powerful third party Windows graphics engine for the desktop that integrates seamlessly into Windows.

WindowBlinds trolls

This week I battled trolls from around the world. There seems to be this inherent hatred of WindowBlinds by some people. But that shouldn't be surprised. Hating stuff is "cool". Didn't you know that? If you want to level up in the Nerd class you have to say something "sucks". Only then will you be able to make use of the +2 Sword of Geekdom.

Most of these people act as if uxtheme (the bundled XP skinning mechanism) was somehow ordained by a higher power. You know, I wonder how people would feel if they learned uxtheme were just WindowBlinds, stripped down with features and bundled in with the OS with the marketing goal of getting people to upgrade to the "full" version?  That's not what happened but let me be clear: If there had been no WindowBlinds, there'd be no uxtheme on XP as we know it.  UXTheme on XP is basically a lite version of WindowBlinds. They work almost the same way. If uxtheme were called WindowBlinds lite, these same trolls would be patting us on the back for our marketing ingenuity. And as a practical matter, that's what UXTheme is.

But some people have taken the intentional limitations of uxtheme as being somehow a feature. It's like saying "I like Photoshop LE better than the full Photoshop because its limitations keep me focused." Right.

This really came up this week during the GUI Olympics. On various sites the winners of the GUI Olympics week 1 (1 of 6 weeks of winner announcements) were announced and the same old "Too bloated" came up. Not that the critics run these skins. Not that they acknowledge that any feature can be turned off pretty much. It's just rationalization by people who think $20 for a product they'll use over and over and over for months or years is a lot of money as they stand in line to pay $8 to see Troy.

After all, who wants to change their progress animations when those great Windows 95-era animations look so classy right? Because the nerdlings can say "Did you know that I was in the Chicago beta back in late 1994 when they first put in those progress animations! This October will be the 10 year anniversary of those great animations! It's sacrilege to pay $20 for software that, amongst other things, can change that!"

Oh to Boot

Meanwhile, we still see problems with BootSkins. It works for most people. But not everyone. We have no idea why. We can't reproduce it. But we have a conundrum. There are two groups of people who have problems. The people who can't get 1.05 to work but had it working on 1.01 and the people who couldn't get 1.01 to work but could get 1.05. We're stumped.  We also have the true-color high resolution BootSkin done. Or at least, as done as it's going to get. We've basically concluded that it's just not worth the effort to finish it. So we're going to probably throw it on Object Desktop as a permanent "beta" that users can give a whirl. It works for probably around 80% of people and the other 20% will get a blue screen or something (don't worry, remember, BootSkin doesn't mess with your system files so you just have to boot up in safe mode or go back to your last good configuration and voila, you're fine).

So that's about it for this week. Next week I'll be talking a bit about new sections on WinCustomize.com and SkinStudio 4.3. I'd like to get a Rainlendar section going on WinCustomize.com as we think it's gotten to the point where it's ready for the big time. But we'll need to get the developers of that app to heavily support the section (i.e. drive traffic to its section so that it doesn't die on the vine).