Blog: Bloated IE, AveDesk, & Docks

Microsoft really needs to do something about Internet Explorer. I doubt most people are even aware but it has slowly evolved into being a huge bloated pig over the years. Hit Ctrl-Shift-Esc to bring up your task manager and see for yourself.

It's always a little ironic when I read someone complaining about the meg or two of memory WindowBlinds uses or some other desktop enhancement when they're probably using IE.  Mozilla, Opera, etc. are all much less resource intensive.  And yet, I always find myself back with IE. I'm not sure why. Microsoft must send out hypnotizing rays or something forcing me to use it and declare that it is "better than Cats".

The Spider-Man 2 desktop came out this week. Clearly it's all a matter of taste but I have to say, this is one of the coolest skins I've used in a long time. Even if it weren't related to Spider-Man (and I'm a huge Spider-Man fan, I have every issue of "Ultimate Spider-Man" which is the reformatted version of the comic book) I would still like this skin.  I just love the Start bar and I don't think I've seen the explorer view panes skinned this well before.

For long time members of our community, the Spider-Man skin represents a milestone of gaining mainstream respectability.  I saw some comments on Neowin where they were thinking the skin was too dramatic. But that's kind of the whole point. There's more to skinning than Luna recolorizations and Mac-like gray skins. It's skins like the Spider-Man skin that I got into this sort of thing in the first place. Bold, different, and creative.

I'll resist talking about Dashboard or Konfabulator this week since some people seem to treat their mention like kryptonite. So instead I'll plug a new program that I think is pretty cool, AveDesk. Written by AndreasV. AndreasV is a well known ObjectDock docklet developer. When we designed the ObjectDock docklet specification, one of the design requirements was to make it generic. It was our hope to create a standard docklet specification so that other programs could share the same docklets.  That way the handful of docklet developers wouldn't have to split their work amongst competing docklet types.  AveDesk uses ObjectDock docklets like stand alone "widgets".  I think this has a lot of potential and benefit for the community. The more docklets, the better and the more programs that support a single specification, the better.

Speaking of docks, for those who think Apple's zoom dock is the end all, be all, here's an article that has some areas it could use some improvement. ObjectDock Plus, btw, addresses most of them.

For instance, one common Mac complaint about their zoom dock is that there's no labels.  By contrast, ObjectDock lets you have labels. I find this useful for my system tray and taskbar since it's easy to lose track of what all those icons are. But I would like to be able to set this on a per tab basis. Not sure that'll get into the "final" build but it's definitely on my wish list along with a "To-Do" plugin.

Has anyone else thought of making a To-Do docklet? I'd imagine it working as follows: You double click on the to-do docklet and it pops up a simple dialog where I name it and describe it and can assign an image for it. It then creates a new dock item of it. When I've finished it, I just drag it off the dock and see it poof. Seeing work finish would be very satisfying.