Brad's Friday Night Skinning Blog Entry: DesktopX, ObjectBar, the GUI Olympics, Alienware, and more!

What a hectic week it's been. We're in the final stages of finishing up The Political Machine. I must go on the record and say that Ubi Soft is a first class team of people to work with. Total pros. We got the game's box design in and it looks great. The game is shaping up really well too. From a pure game mechanics point of view, I think this is the best game I've ever worked on, even better than Galactic Civilizations.  It's smaller in scope by design but packs a lot of punch in game play. I'd love to turn this into a board game at some point.

We also have been working a lot on SkinStudio. Getting version 4.3 out the door has been a high priority for quite awhile. SkinStudio 4.3 is a pretty "big deal". Pity it's coming out in the middle of summer. Okay, why is it a big deal? 3 reasons: 1) It explicitly supports exporting toolbar icons and progress animations as stand alone items. WinCustomize is going to add two new sections shortly for toolbar icons and progress animations so that users will be more inclined to mix and match these components together.  We also want to encourage artists who might just want to create toolbar icons or progress animations to do just that. 2) It is the culmination of a year of effort to nail down MSStyle -> WindowBlinds conversions. This is something we knew we needed to get done before the Longhorn betas come out. Because in Longhorn, MSStyles go bye bye. There's a lot of good skinning out there that would otherwise become "legacy". Since we fully expect WindowBlinds to work on Longhorn (either as-is or in some updated version) WB users would be able to make use of all those MSStyles that are floating around out there and there would be a place for MSStyles users to go.  3) SkinStudio 4.3 has a lot more error checking. The GUI Olympics has shown us why some people still find WindowBlinds "buggy". Many skins have small errors that don't show up on most people's computers but on some computers and on some programs can cause problems. SkinStudio 4.3 should enable skinners to create more visual styles.

Speaking of the GUI Olympics, the last two events are about to be judged and what a pain it is. The icon judging is really giving the judges pain. There are really 4 icon packages in particular in which any of them could get the gold and yet one of them is going to not be in the top 3.

The big skinning story of the week has to be the announcement that Alienware is going to be bundling Stardock's Object Desktop OEM (aka "Theme Manager") on all its machines. As some may recall, recent benchmarks from UGO have shown that games run slightly faster if WindowBlinds is providing the visual styles rather than uxtheme (i.e. slightly more FPS). So as someone said, this is a match made in heaven.  MikeB, who is one of the big winners at the GUI Olympics is helping with the skin. We also structured the arrangement so that the version of WindowBlinds that comes with it includes one branded visual style and then additional ones would have to be purchased for a nominal fee (with much of that fee going to skin authors, it uses a special WindowBlinds format). What's particularly ironic about this is that this deal to open the door so that skin authors could now more easily get paid to make skins came out just as some users were trying to claim that companies like Stardock leech off skinners as if the GUI Olympics with its $15k in prizes wasn't enough of a statement of how Stardock feels about skinners.

Jeff and co are working hard on a new version of ObjectDock (freeware) and a Plus version (ObjectDock Plus!) which will have a bunch of cool new features such as system tray support, tabs, multiple docks, task grouping, Start menu, very slick edge screen docking (where only the tabs will show up until you put your mouse there), mouse activation, slick dragging and dropping, skinning, and a bunch of other stuff.  We hope to have a beta of it available this month.

The other big thing being worked on right now is ObjectBar 2 which is a totally reimagining of it. We will probably break out the right-click menu part of it and make it a separate program (still part of Object Desktop). Having the Right click be a separate program would make it more usable and make ObjectBar's UI cleaner. ObjectBar 2 itself is going to be a fundamentally different looking program to interact with. It'll be much more focused on functionality. The skinning will still be there but generally we're going to migrate more to having it just inherit the WindowBlinds skin more so that we can focus more on having it be a useful productivity program. This will also serve as the basis for ControlCenter 2. Hopefully that'll show up later this summer. Lots of work left to do. But you can see from the screenshot here that it's got a lot cleaner, simpler user interface.

There is also some talk about taking IconX out of DesktopX and making it a separate program (still part of Object Desktop). All existing owners of DesktopX would get IconX still but this way it could get more of the glory it deserves. The poll on WinCustomize demonstrates a lot of people have no idea what IconX is.  So I'll tell you, IconX is an amazing feature of DesktopX that lets users control how their desktop icons behave. It can put shadows on them, make them react to mouse events (mouse over, etc.). They can grow and shrink on the fly, be colorized, have sounds associated with events, and much more. It's just supremely cool. But it tends to get overshadowed by some of DesktopX's other cool features. Not sure what we'll end up doing or when we'd do it. But it's being talked about.  Even if you just use DesktopX for this feature, it's worth it. DesktopX's overhead is miniscule and IconX can make your desktop incredibly slick.

So tomorrow we gotta get the GUI Olympics results up. That shouldn't take too much time. SkinStudio 4.3 (the free version) is actually now available, just not announced. Shhhh.