Featured WC Gallery: ObjectBar/ObjectBar 2
Tuesday, October 16, 2007 by Zoomba | Discussion: OS Customization
Over time, the list of applications supported here on WinCustomize grows and grows. Gone are the days where you only had a small handful of applications that met all of your skinning needs. While choice is great, the consequence can be that some tools don't get quite the attention that others do. There's no question that WindowBlinds is successful, we have thousands of skins from the last 8 or 9 years, and the gallery expands nearly every day.
One of those apps that people forget about, but is absolutely fantastic is ObjectBar, a toolbar utility that comes as part of Object Desktop. It lets you create start bars, finders, pop-up menus, launchers, docks and so on, and it can all be skinned to match your chosen theme! It's a stellar utility for any power user who has to keep track of a lot of different applications and tasks.
Development has kept going, with version 2.1 having been released just yesterday. So I'm hoping that this article can entice skinners to take another look at the program and start skinning for it again.
Now, why should you care about ObjectBar? Well, like I said, it's a great tool for anyone who finds themselves managing a lot of different applications, files, folders and misc content on their PC. I personally have about half a dozen applications open at any given time (not counting IM, IRC, e-mail or web browsers) that I need to do my job. I have files on my desktop, on external drives, and various locations across the network that I regularly have to update and reference. Having a bunch of shortcuts on my desktop just wouldn't cut it.
And of course, not only do I need a utility to help me manage all of these items, I need it to look good too! Now, ObjectBar does come with some outstanding skins, and it has the ability to try and match your current WindowBlinds skin, but sometimes that just doesn't do it for me. Even the skin matching isn't always enough since it does match parts of the skin, but sometimes it will match less interesting parts (like the skin I'm using now uses gray bars with spashes of color at the edges and for buttons, the ObjectBar matches to a gray bar. No splashes of color. Kind of boring). In those cases, you'll want to download a skin designed for the tool. And skins can go beyond just visual enhancements, they can add actual utility.
Currently, we have one gallery for ObjectBar 1 and another one for ObjectBar 2. ObjectBar 2 will actually run all v1 skins, so we'll be consolidating them in the near future, but for now you have two galleries to browse through when looking for skins.
Here are a few of my favorite skins for ObjectBar.
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Arileen |
Clear OB |
Mac OS X Bar 10.8 |
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Windows Vista v1.1 |
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Reply #2 Wednesday, October 17, 2007 5:37 PM
You can customize a bar to launch anything, make it look like anything, load widgets if you want.
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Reply #1 Wednesday, October 17, 2007 5:18 PM
I am not very disciplined to create a bar myself, and have yet to see anything worth using, but keep hoping that will be the case someday.