Object Desktop: Tweak 7 and beyond

Friday, October 9, 2009 by Frogboy | Discussion: Personal Computing

imageYesterday Object Desktop Ultimate users were treated to the latest build of Tweak 7.

There’s been a lot of work with this under the hood and I’m still not sure what the ultimately direction for this program should be because I don’t want it to become full of snake oil tweaks. We want to focus Tweak 7 on useful features, ideally ones that can be put into the new version of TweakVista as well.

One of the new pages is called “Usability”.  This is one of the areas I’ve been pounding on for the past few months here and we’ve tried lots of different things with varying degrees of success.

Let’s walk through the usability tab for this blog:

image

Context handlers are one of those things that drive many users nuts. They’re the system tray clutter of 2009 – everyone wants to get their crappy thing into the right-click menu.  There are plenty of programs out there that can manage them but they often seem really cryptic. Our goal is to make this a very easy and safe way to control what gets put into those menus.

image

The Profile location is still a work in progress but the idea here is to let you put your “stuff” on other drives.  My C drive is an SSD and my D drive is a huge conventional drive.  I don’t want all my stuff on the C drive.  You can move some of your folders over from Windows explorer but many others you can’t easily do so and it’s a pain.

The idea here is to let people put their stuff wherever they want rather than being forced to use the C drive. It works extremely seamlessly.

image

The third tab includes the confirmation options.  This is an area that will be growing and growing and growing as we find new ways to get rid of the “Are you sure?” dialogs that Windows seems to love.  We’re just getting started on this but you get the idea.

If you don’t have Object Desktop Ultimate, you can get it here: www.objectdesktop.com.

If you do, make sure you have chosen to see betas in the Impulse settings.

Jafo
Reply #1 Friday, October 9, 2009 7:06 PM

My C drive is an SSD and my D drive is a huge conventional drive. I don’t want all my stuff on the C drive.

Ditto....and is going to become more common as time goes on....

GhoS
Reply #2 Friday, October 9, 2009 9:32 PM
Awesome additions, glad to see more coming as well. I dislike the mess in the context menu but haven't bothered to try a program just to deal with it. Wtg Stardock.
Kitkun
Reply #3 Friday, October 9, 2009 9:41 PM

Seems if I wait long enough, Stardock will solve all the things that annoy me on my computer.

 

Diamond12a
Reply #4 Friday, October 9, 2009 10:08 PM
One feature that is very needed in Windows and only exists in one freeware option - the ability to pick which programs run at start-up (which Tweak and many other programs have) and also how long to DELAY loading the program. IT can be done with this, would love to see it added to the Tweak programs: http://www.r2.com.au/software.php?page=2&show=startdelay
c242
Reply #5 Saturday, October 10, 2009 6:50 AM

Diamond12a
One feature that is very needed in Windows and only exists in one freeware option - the ability to pick which programs run at start-up

 

Ever tried Start -> Run -> msconfig ?

Neil Banfield
Reply #6 Saturday, October 10, 2009 8:05 AM




Quoting Diamond12a,
reply 4
One feature that is very needed in Windows and only exists in one freeware option - the ability to pick which programs run at start-up


 

Ever tried Start -> Run -> msconfig ?

I think the key part is this "and also how long to DELAY loading the program"

Diamond12a
Reply #7 Saturday, October 10, 2009 12:51 PM
Exactly - "DELAY" being the key word
CharlesCS
Reply #8 Sunday, October 11, 2009 1:51 PM

I have a request if it is possible. If Tweak  is meant to make changes in Windows 7 can it also be set to add folders to the start menu? As you can see in the image below Vista had the Game folder in the menu (which was kinda useless to me at least) under the Music and Picture folders but did not allow folders to be added. The second image is my Windows 7 start menu which does not have the game folder but still does not let you add folders to it. I will never understand why, if Windows is being promoted as Media Center type of OS in most of it's versions, why not have the Video folder in this section of the Start Menu?

boss0190
Reply #9 Sunday, October 11, 2009 5:21 PM

You can already add "Videos" to the Start Menu in 7, and you can take others, such as "Downloads" or "Favorites" which you might not use and rename them and point them to where you want.

Not sure if there was an option for Videos on the Start Menu in Vista.

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