Which gallery items do you like the best? I find it difficult to choose among so much good work out there, but here are some of my current favorites. Which skins do you recommend? Which widgets do you love? Let us know!

Skins:

Semiprecious by Pallet

Retro by essorant

Wallpaper:

Portality by RPGuere

--Seraphim-- by Green Armani

BootSkins:

Up Side Down by Wabmo

GenieInPC  by ChaosMachine

LogonSkins:

Airlock by Bushman

Black-Tiger by butch123

DesktopX Widgets:

Glassy Calculator by adni18 

Dark Info Center  by CerebroJD

Here is my current screenshot:

You can find all of these items and a few more on my recommendations page: Link.

Share some of your favorites!

2004 Year in review..

Our story so far...

Object Desktop is a suite of programs that lets users customize the way Microsoft Windows looks, feels, and functions.  As the capabilities of Windows changes, so does Object Desktop.  It was originally released in December 1999 and has evolved dramatically since then. 

When a user purchases Object Desktop, they get everything already on it plus everything we create for it during the subsequent year. If a user wants to keep getting new updates and new features, they can re-subscribe to ObjectDesktop.net to continue getting new updates (if you don't renew you keep everything you already have).

Since updates during the year are a big deal to users who are considering renewing their access to ObjectDekstop.net, what comes out in a given year is worth talking about.

A Guided Tour of what's been improved...

2004 has been a turning point in Object Desktop's career.  It was the year when many elements of it finally came together: Mature programs, documentation, and support.

Stardock Central

For example, when Object Desktop first came out, users had to get their updates through a program called "Component Manager". This program "did the job" but was kind of clunky in use and many users had frustrations in terms of backing up and having to constantly re-download things.

Stardock Central completely replaces it.

Stardock Central.

What Stardock Central does is combine forums, chat, downloading, and other features all together into a single program. And when users download updates, they only download the parts they don't already have. Instead of 10 megabyte downloads they may only have 100K downloads.

WindowBlinds

For users of WindowBlinds (and IconPackager,) 2004 was the best year ever. WindowBlinds 4.4 runs rings around the bundled Windows XP visual style engine both in terms of performance and in memory use even as it skins a lot more parts of the Windows GUI.

And IconPackager has had a renaissance this year as great new icons have come out for it this year. The GUI Olympics really delivered some fantastic new skins and icons.

Below are some screenshots from this year.

And in icons..

This year WindowBlinds also added some new features such as progress animations and toolbar icon changes:

Progress Animations

Toolbar icons.

Not only did WindowBlinds 4.4 add support for changing toolbar icons in Internet Explorer and Explorer as well as support for changing progress animations, it also was 40% faster in many areas than previous versions of WindowBlinds.  Most users should notice an immediate performance boost when moving from the included Windows XP look and feel to WindowBlinds.

Learn more on WindowBlinds at www.windowblinds.net.

SkinStudio

SkinStudio 4.4 came out this year and it supports the new WindowBlinds features such as toolbar creation and progress animations but it also added the ability to create more advanced shellstyles (Windows explorer task panels). 

For instance, normally in Windows the explorer task panels on are on the left side. But now with WindowBlinds 4.4, you can have them on the top:

See how the task panels are on the top of the window? SkinStudio supports this.

SkinStudio also makes it easy to make use of the Microsoft .msstyles format. So those .msstyles that are out there can be used just like any other skin format if you have SkinStudio installed. It's totally seamless. And what's nice is that WindowBlinds will run msstyles faster and on more programs than if they were using Microsoft's skin applying system.

SkinStudio in action

SkinStudio's home page it www.skinstudio.net.

Keyboard LaunchPad

For users looking to dramatically increase their productivity, there's The Keyboard LaunchPad. This is a relatively new addition to Object Desktop that allows users to assign a hot key to pretty much anything they might want to do.

Actions such as clipboard contents, website URLs, program launching and more.  We here at Stardock use it a lot for saving clipboard contents (canned replies for instance and saved screenshots). We also use it to navigate to very common websites and support sites. This program doesn't get nearly as much attention as it deserves even though it's one of the most useful programs ever made.

Theme Manager

Theme Manager is the successor to WinStyles. It provides the single point access to all the Object Desktop GUI customization programs (plus other programs as well) for changing skins, themes, icons and wallpapers and more.

You can use Theme Manager to just change your icons. Or you can build your own "suites" of skins/themes/icons together that create an entire desktop. Think of a suite as a desktop screenshot that has all the stuff included in it to get back to that screenshot. 

DesktopX

One of the biggest stories for Object Desktop this past year has been DesktopX 2.x.  DesktopX spent its first couple of years of existence as being a kind of neat technology experiment.  It was this year, however, that DesktopX really became very useful for even casual users.

With DesktopX you can still build entire desktops, but it's become very popular for creating mini-applications called widgets.  In fact, Stardock used DesktopX to create the user interface in The Political Machine and is currently using it to create the screens for Galactic Civilizations II.  It's phenomenal technology.

Widgets are basically little programs that exist on your desktop. They can be as simple as clocks or as complex as a game. They have less overhead than a stand alone program tends to have which makes them ideal for doing things like playing music, monitoring system resources, displaying local weather, providing news feeds, etc.

With DesktopX 2.2, widgets can now be activated with a hot key. So even if you have them covered by a bunch of windows, you can easily bring them to top with the press of a button.

IconX

IconX was born because as icon quality has increased, the ability to get the most out of those icons was limited.

Here's the deal: In Windows you can set your icon size globally. That is a problem because if you want to have nice big icons on your desktop, you also get huge icons everywhere else.

IconX lets you have huge icons just on your desktop if you want as well as all kinds of cool effects such as zooming icons (icons grow when you put your mouse over them), sound effects, shadows, and other goodies. And it lets you also have .PNG files as icons as well as make images into thumbnails if they're on your desktop.

The same is true of icon labels which can be really big and thick -- just on your desktop.

WindowFX

WindowFX plodded towards 3.0 this year -- slowly. But it did gain a pretty remarkable new feature that is waiting until 2005 to fully be explored: Scaleable windows:

When turned on, a user can hold down the shift key while minimizing a program to put it into scaled window mode.  For users with limited real-estate, this can be quite useful.  Or for people who want to casually monitor chat or other things but not have it eat up too much space, it's very useful for that as well.

New Programs of Object Desktop in 2004

IconDeveloper

Object Desktop also added icon creation support with IconDeveloper. IconDeveloper is designed to make it easy to take images and turn them into icons.

When it comes to making icons, IconDeveloper really does make it easy for people to create and adjust icons all at once.  Stand-alone programs of this nature cost $30 and IconDeveloper is just another program that is part of Object Desktop.

Learn more of it at www.icondeveloper.com.

RightClick

RightClick is a new program that went into beta at the tail end of 2004. It is a very straight forward program - it replaces the right-click desktop menu.

It can automatically inherit your WindowBlinds visual style and have all kinds of useful functionality in it (including embedding widgets!). 

People who have started running it have found it extremely useful.

RightClick could be used to let power users do away with their actual Windows start bar if they want (it even supports having the system tray in it).  It can also be set to have a hot key to bring it up. So unlike the "real" desktop right click menu, RightClick can be brought up even if there are windows obscuring the Windows desktop.

Coming Attractions in 2005...

WebExplorer (tentative name)

Stardock is working on an Internet Explorer based web browser. It's basically Internet Explorer with a tabbed based interface. That's it. Nothing fancy. It's not going to try to reinvent the web browser as we know it. We simply want users to be able to have a tabbed base Internet Explorer.

Enhanced File Dialog

This new feature will extend most common Windows file dialogs to have a lot more features.

All kinds of customization will become possible to the standard Windows file dialog.

Screenshots of it in action:

PowerTune

PowerTune is a significant departure from the whole "customization" portion of Object Desktop and back to the utility aspects. The idea behind PowerTune is relatively straight forward - it's getting too complicated to keep your PC optimized.

There are some great utilities out there that can help optimize your PC but they usually cost quite a bit and are usually overkill in terms of features.  The main features of PowerTune will include:

• Duplicate File Finder/Remover

• Advanced Disk Space Recovery

• Temporary Internet file manager

• Registry Repair/Clean

• Windows Task List extensions

• Windows memory, CPU, and video performance optimization

• Windows stability analysis and monitoring

This isn't a complete list but the general idea is to allow power users as well as casual users keep their systems running well without having to spend very much effort doing it.  PowerTune is due in late 2005 in beta form.

ControlCenter 2 / ObjectBar 2

ControlCenter and ObjectBar are slowly being merged together. The idea is to make it easier for people to have virtual desktop managers that are easier to use and more productive than at present. The beta is already available of ObjectBar 2.

Conclusions

Object Desktop has come a long way since its inception.  And it continues to get better and better over time.  The existing key features such as WindowBlinds, DesktopX, IconPackager and so forth have become more robust and more fully featured. And new features add new value and abilities to the package as a whole. We hope you like the direction we're going and the improvements we've already put into it.

We also think it is probably the world's best software deal.  For $49.95 a user gets all these things plus everything we make for an additional year.  Imagine the user who purchased Object Desktop in say 2003 and decided to renew their access to get new programs and updates for the year 2004 for $34.95.  The new programs and updates listed they would have received as part of that! That's less than $3 per program and update.

Object Desktop

Object Desktop     [download only] Get all of Object Desktop now and everything created and updated for it for an entire year after! $49.95 Object Desktop CD Get all of Object Desktop now and everything created and updated for it for an entire year after! $49.95   Object Desktop Renewal Renew your access for an additional year to new Object Desktop updates and new programs. $34.95   Object Desktop Upgrade Upgrade from one of the components below to Object Desktop. $34.95

An Icon a day Keeps the Creative Block away. (I hope)   

    As some of you may have noticed, and gotten mad at me for, I have not had a new free Iconpack out for quite some time. This is not so much because I have been doing Premium Suites, it's because I just have not been able to find any time. Since I have started working at Stardock, over a year ago now, I have been doing a lot of fun stuff at work. Making video game UI's, Skins, and 3D. This has been sapping the amount of creativity I have left when I get home. Not to mention my cursed time sucking addiction of Halo 2.

    This brings me to the point of this blog. Starting today, I am going to find some time every day to make one (1) Icon. This will give us a new complete Iconpack in about 60 days.

Here is my plan.
    1) Design 1 Icon a day, starting with the folder. (Can't help but do this)
    2) Post that Icon in the Misc Icons section over on wincustomize. This way anyone who wants to can get the Icons as they are made, and not have to wait for the completed pack.
    3) Post a short blog on the making of each Icon. This hopefully will allow for feedback from users, and help make the pack better.

With that lets get started.
 

Icon 01 (Closed folder)    The folder is always one of the hardest Icons to do. It sets the style for the entire pack of Icons. I tend to spend the most time on the folder Icon, but I am going to force myself to crank this one out. Because this is the first article in this series I am going to show a bit more of the "making of" than I will have time to do in the future.    I am going to be using CorelDraw to do all the designing in this pack; if you want you can get a free trial copy at www.corel.com. If you are more comfortable with other graphics programs hopefully you will be able to get the basics of what I am doing and translate it into that programs tool set.    One last thing; I am going to be referring to a lot of tools and techniques over the life of this blog series and I won't have time to describe them in these articles. I will try and do some individual tutorials on how I use each tool and technique as time goes by, if requested.
Step 1: Using the Rectangle Tool, I Draw a 1.28 x 1.28 box. I use this to make sure to keep my Icon in a square aspect, and so the Icon dose not become stretched or distorted when I make it. Then I create another rectangle and, using the Mesh fill tool, "Sculpt" it into the back side of my folder.	Step 2: Using the Mesh fill tool I go in and do some detail. In this case I am adding in some bevels and gradients. I am winging this, so I think I will go ahead and make the back black. I am going to go with a metal and composite look for this. I am doing a lot of this in the Galactic Civilizations GUI, and am in that kind of mood. Plus maybe in the process of making this pack I can use some of the ideas in the game screens, and vice versa.	Step 3: I want some texture in all of these Icons because I am in that kind of mode at the moment, plus it is a simple technique that can make for a nice rich feel. I don't have a lot of time for these Icons, and I will be using allot of the more popular looks. So using the interactive transparency tool, I take a copy of the back of the folder. Change it to 30% black and add a stretched wave texture, setting the transparency to Multiply.
Step 4: Now following the same steps as in Step 1, I use another rectangle and the Mesh tool to mold it into the shape I want the folder front to be. As in Step 2, I use the mesh fill tool to give the folder front some detail.	Step 5: Now I use the same steps as in Step 3 to make transparent texture over the front part of the folder. Then I draw some of the obligatory white glare on the front of the folder and the tab. Then use the Interactive Transparency tool to fade it out from top to bottom. Giving us that Shiny look.	Step 6: Now I just draw a black shape that I can use to pull a drop shadow off of for my shadow. I am having to do the shadow this way because I want it to look slanted back, and I don't want the standard shadows. The only trick here is to set the shadows opacity to 100% so I can do something with it in the next step.
Step 7: Now I break the shadow apart from the shadow shape I drew and delete the shape. Then using the Interactive Transparency tool I fade the shadow out. Also using Arrange I send the shadow to the back of the folder.	Step 8: I see a lot of people do a reflection of their icon in their screen shots, but I thought it might be fun to try and do it in all the Icons of this pack. So lets do it. To do this I simply copy the elements of my folder, Flip, Move,  and Skew them into the location I want. Then convert them into a bitmap (24 bit RGB).	Step 9: Now to get that reflected look, I can simply crop the created bitmap to fit inside my guide box, and using the Interactive Transparency tool fade it out.
Finished Icon image.	Download the finished Icon.
Now I use IconDeveloper, or other Icon program, to create the Icon. There are several other tutorials out there telling you how to do that so I will make you look them up. For this pack, in the interest of not limiting what we can design, I have decided to only do 32 bit Icons for Windows XP. So there we go, Icon # 1 is done. You can download it here if you want to play with it. Tomorrow. I will do the Default File Icon. This is another of those Icons that sets the mood of the entire pack. And don't forget to check for all the Icon-A-Day icons as they get made, in the miscellaneous Icons Gallery at Wincustomize.com