Blog: Going on vacation, Aston vs. Talisman, Custom taskbars...

I'm going on vacation tomorrow for a week. Hopefully the site will still be here when I get back.   The irony is that next week The Political Machine will be released. It was on CNN Headline News yesterday. I'm working on a post mortem on the game for Game Developer.  One of the things we'll be talking about is the fact that we used DesktopX to develop the game screens and then created a DirectX backend to read in the DesktopX objects and blit them in a full screen game.  But like I said, I won't be around, going to Higgins Lake Michigan. Looking forward to getting away and relaxing. 

Talisman vs. Aston...

The other day I asked if anyone knew of a good Aston vs. Talisman competitive review.  Doesn't look like there are any. So yesterday I spent a few hours playing with them both. Me commenting on other desktop customization products, especially if there's negativity, is highly inappropriate btw since I work for Stardock.  But then again, I'm always inappropriate. So you can take my opinions for what they're worth.  I used them both and I did find Aston to be significantly "better" from an end user point of view when trying out the various themes.

For Talisman, my biggest problem was that it seemed overly concerned with looking pretty rather than being useful out of the box. The biggest problem that all of these shells and shell enhancers (including OUR stuff btw) is that they generally do a poor job of letting you share your desktop with others. They always seem very specific to the original author's machine. But some are less poor than others.  Talisman seemed to me to be something that is probably pretty decent if you're creating a shell environment for yourself. But when you go and create stuff for others, things don't go as well.  The default themes had some problems on my computer. I wouldn't give it a hard time on that except these are the default themes and it was pretty basic stuff like the taskbar goofing up because I have a lot of tasks running and the system try clock looking goofy. And none of them seem to have task grouping which, I suspect, kills these shells to begin with for most users.

I'm really surprised that something that's been developed this long would have such obvious problems.  Again, I want to stress that I am not claiming to be a Talisman expert. I am just talking about loading it up and running into glitches that would happen to anyone.  Taskbar overflowing, for instance, just seems to be unforgivable in a third generation product. I'll be writing a more thorough review when I get back.

My Aston experience was much smoother with themes but it isn't fooling around about wanting to be your shell. Its taskbar features are also pretty primitive but it felt a lot snappier and less flakey than Talisman.  The included themes worked the way you would expect them to.  The only gripe I have is that one of them is an Aqua theme complete with Apple's trademarked logo which I suspect they didn't acquire a license to use.  One can forgive freeware programs for playing fast and loose with intellectual property law but commercial software needs to be at a higher standard.  If you think YOUR stuff is worth charging for, then it's probably good not to bundle other people's stuff with it. A minor quibble since the difference between bundling stuff and having it available on your library may seem like splitting hairs but I think it matters. But I doubt most people care either way.

I think the biggest difference between Aston and Talisman is that Aston feels better put together.  Talisman strikes me as something that has too much legacy code in it and they keep taping more stuff on top of it.  By contrast, Aston feels like it had a specific vision and went for it. Its interface seems more logically put together. Its system tray support seemed more complete to me.  Not that it was a slam dunk either way.  For instance, I couldn't find a way to have my desktop icons show on the desktop. That's a big deal to me and I suspect others too. But overall I had a much more positive experience with Aston than Talisman. And btw, I have no relationship with either developer. I've never spoken to either one as far as I know.

Now, someone might be asking why we don't support these programs on WinCustomize. The biggest reason is simple: deep linking.  Both deep link to the skin libraries of other sites. They don't have their own libraries. Oh, they look like they do. But look closer. If you actually download a theme you'll discover that it's actually going to deviantART or Skinz.org or some other site that is paying the bandwidth bill without even so much as a button promoting the skin site whose bandwidth they're using. And again, one might cut some slack for a free program but these programs aren't free. Aston is $28 for instance. They should have banners or something for those sites. They don't have to deep link to the actual file, they could just link to the library entry. When Studio Twenty Eight links to files from its meta library, it does it right. Example of how to do it. He's not deep linking to the underlying .zip file. This way, the site can potentially get new visitors and get ad revenue and such.  Anyway, it's a pet peeve of mine that maybe you think I'm making a big deal of.  I just think that commercial software developers who rely on skin sites should be trying to support those skin sites, not just silently use their bandwidth without giving back.

But anyway, if you're looking to use themes created by others, I give the edge to Aston over Talisman. If you're looking to create your own desktop yourself, then someone else's view would be more appropriate as I have no experience in that.

Customize your Windows taskbar...

On a totally different topic, I got an interesting email today from a user who just wants to have a nicer Start bar (the taskbar typically at the bottom of your screen). But they don't want the rest of their computer to look all weird.  After some thought I answered: WindowBlinds.  In WindowBlinds you can have one visual style be your main GUI and another one just for the taskbar (Start bar and menu).  So you would just download the Luna WindowBlinds visual style. Use that as your main GUI (blue, silver, green) and then download the skin whose taskbar you like and then set your main skin to be Luna and the taskbar to be the one you like. Voila.

So that's all for now.  Hope you all have a great week! Some exciting things coming in the next few weeks.