Blog: Balloon-related injuries, Natural Desktop, and Skinning

I can't believe this. I may have broken my foot playing with a balloon. Yes, another balloon-related injury.  The four year old and I were trying to bat the balloon as high as we could to get it touch the ceiling (we have a very high ceiling in our living room) and well, I succeeded in that but came crashing down into furniture thus fulfilling the nerd-like stereotype.

So here I am at home immobilized as I type this up. It definitely is slowing me down on all the things I have to do. So let me first say, to those people who email me, please be aware I get around 1200 email each day of which 300 or so are non-spam. So as a result, I cannot answer anywhere near all of them and even those I do get to, I tend to be delayed in responding. And needless to say, being stuck on a couch hasn't helped.

Natural Desktop has been a huge hit. And we've been listening to feedback and adding more and more features that we hope to release relatively soon (free of course) to those who have purchased it. My personal request is that it be able to allow more wallpapers to be added and then randomly select between them. 

Being the nerd I am, I have Natural Desktop running full time on one of my machines just for its sound track. I'm very glad about that because it's a beautiful day outside right now but I'm stuck here inside with my broken foot. So I can still "hear" the sounds of outdoors via Natural Desktop playing on the speakers from the other PC. Each person seems to find something different about Natural Desktop.  For me, it's the sound tracks - having natural sounds playing based on the time of day.  For others, it's the wallpapers that change based on time of day and time of year.  And still others they like the animated portal. I have to say, Tiggz did an incredible job on that. I am going to look at the code to figure out how he did the animated weather display.  Most of the weather displays are images that, at best, play a set animation. But in Natural Desktop, each cloud that passes is unique. The rain and clouds and time of day are all seamlessly blended together. 

Which brings me to my other request - to allow people to set what the weather is so that they can control what it is. In 1.0, it just uses your local weather info. But I think it would show off the value of it further if people could see just how much stuff is in there. It's incredibly detailed.  The upcoming version will even show the proper moon phase along with the weather.

There's been some great WindowBlinds skins lately but I want to highlight one in particular today, DanilloOc's NeoShell takes advantage of the new WindowBlinds 4.4 features of being able to have the explorer task panel at the top instead of just the left. It's very cool.

BTW, those of you who make skin suites really should try to use Theme Manager and the suite section here. First, it'll increase your download counts because you can make suites that download each component from WinCustomize. Secondly, it makes it more convenient for users. See Adni's MSII as an example.

And of course, WinCustomize premium subscribers are now able create and use personal pages here. It's the first phase of the WC2K5 roll-out.  If you're not already a subscriber, you can choose the store link and get set up. The WC2K5 roll-out will expand to more users next month as we finalize the personal pages features. Then we'll move on to the libraries, site, and forums.