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Icon-A-Day, Icon # 98, PST File

A bonus Icon no more.

Monday, May 23, 2005 by mormegil | Discussion: Icons

Icon 98 (PST File)

Tonight we will continue on with our IconPackager 3.0 File icons. This icon is one I had intended doing as a bonus icon - part of the Office icon sets - but now it is supported in the defaults file types. I will do just the file tonight. Tomorrow I will do the Bonus Application icon and Folder as well.

This will more or less be the same as the Access and Word files we did way back toward the middle.
 
Step 1:

We will start by copying the MDB file and removing the Access Overlay. We also change the base colors to Outlook's signature golden yellow. Also we change the title to PST.

 Step 2:

Now I have an Outlook logo in my scrap graphics, so I import it and give it our standard perspective.

 Step 3:

Now we give the Logo a poor mans bevel with the Contour tool.

 
Step 4:

We give the bevel some gradients to make it match. I also give the face of the logo some gloss.

Step 5:

Now with our Reflection techniques I give the logo two reflections, one on the files face, and one on the floor in front of it.

 Step 6:

Last using our shadow techniques we give it a nice custom shadow.

Step 7

During the process of making this file, I had a nice crash and had to start over. So once again I have to change the title back to PST.
Finished Icon Image.



Download the Completed Icons here.

Tomorrow we will make a nice bonus pack of the Outlook Application icon and an Outlook Folder.

Read the other Icon-A-Day Articles: (Icon-A-Day Index)

Check out the CorelDRAW for Skinner Index, for links to all the related Video Tutorials.

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
All Images and Text in this tutorial are © Paul Boyer, and may not be reused without written permission.

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Icon-A-Day, Icon # 97, PDF File

Good times with file extentions.

Sunday, May 22, 2005 by mormegil | Discussion: Icons

Icon 97 (PDF File)

One of the most common file types that has been added to IconPackager 3.0 file format is the PDF file. PDF files are mostly used for documents, but they can contain text and graphics, so I try and make sure there is a bit of everything in the file. On top of this we will overlay an Adobe Acrobat logo.
 
Step 1:

First we copy the Write file. Remove the pen and tweak the copy with the Text Tool.

 Step 2:

Now to set it apart a bit I change the background title bar to black.
 Step 3:

Now I need an Acrobat logo, so I draw one with the Bezier Tool.


 
Step 4:

Now that I have drawn the logo as a line, I use the Artistic Brush tool to give it a calligraphic effect.

Step 5:

Now I break the Artistic Brush shape apart and give it a contour, for a bit of a outline.

 Step 6:

I give our new shapes some fills to flesh out our logo. And place it in front of our file.

Step 7

Now we give the logo a shadow and break it apart and crop it, so it only falls on the file.

 Step 8

We pull one more shadow off the logo and fade it out, so it falls behind the file.

 Step 9

Last we once more give our new file a new reflection.

Finished Icon Image.


Download the Completed Icons here.

We are approaching the end of our pack; more file types to come. Tomorrow we will do anther new IconPackager 3.0 File type.

Read the other Icon-A-Day Articles: (Icon-A-Day Index)

Check out the CorelDRAW for Skinner Index, for links to all the related Video Tutorials.

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
All Images and Text in this tutorial are © Paul Boyer, and may not be reused without written permission.

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Icon-A-Day, Icon # 96, TIF File

Back form E3, back to work.

Saturday, May 21, 2005 by mormegil | Discussion: Icons

Icon 96 (TIF File)

Well, I'm back from E3 alive and kicking, though just barely. Today I want to get back into the new IconPackager 3.0 default file types. When we left off we were doing the PNG file. Today we will do one of the new image files: the TIF file. This will be done in almost the same way as the PNG file with a few exceptions. Once more this is a good example of how the same techniques can be used over and over and yet achieve quite different results.
 
Step 1:

First we copy our PNG file, remove the overlay graphics, and change the title to TIF. We also remove the existing reflection.

 Step 2:

Now again with the techniques from Gloss Tutorial we make a nice cyan colored  lens shape.

 Step 3:

Now I pull a simple drop shadow with a nice dark cyan color to give it a more glassy look.


 
Step 4:

Now we simply copy our cyan shape, and change the colors to Yellow.

Step 5:

Now we make another copy in magenta.

 Step 6:

And one last copy in black.

Step 7

Now we go through and convert the four shapes to bitmaps giving them a slight transparency so they look more glassy.

 Step 8

Now I tighten up the color shapes to a formation I like and place them above the file.
 Step 9

Once more our last step is to give the new file a new reflection.

Finished Icon Image.


Download the Completed Icons here.
 

Tomorrow we will do anther new IconPackager 3.0 File type.

Read the other Icon-A-Day Articles: (Icon-A-Day Index)

Check out the CorelDRAW for Skinner Index, for links to all the related Video Tutorials.

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
All Images and Text in this tutorial are © Paul Boyer, and may not be reused without written permission.

1 Reply 13 Referrals

Be careful what you blog for..

Your public blog is..well public..

Friday, May 20, 2005 by Draginol | Discussion: Internet

Last week I had my first really bad experience with the power of JoeUser's automated category syndication.  You see, when you write an article on JoeUser.com, the system will look at what category you filed it under and then syndicate it out to other sites on the Stardock.net system.  So if I write a blog on politics, it will show up on JoeUser.com.  Write a blog on skinning and it shows up on WinCustomize.com.  The system does work both ways where those sites feed into JoeUser.com as well.  But those sites have much more restricted choices for what category something can be filed.

Well, back in April I wrote a couple blogs on gaming.  The first one was about Will Wright's Spore and how I think his concept could be revolutionary because it puts the player in the role of the content creator.  If developers can find clever ways to make the player part of the content creation team, costs can be reduced, quality kept high, and players made happy. 

I reposted my blog on a semi-private forum I hang out on called Quarter To Three where many gaming professionals hang out.  On there, one respondent indicated he worked at a major game developer and strongly disagreed with my points.  I debated the issue on there but also wrote a follow-up blog on JoeUser.com that quoted his material and mentioned what game developer he worked for.  That blog, categorized as a PC gaming article, got syndicated to several sites such as GalCiv2.com, SocietyGame.com, and TotalGaming.net.  And then got featured on TotalGaming.net by a forum moderator (along with the original).

The guy who worked at the game developer was ticked off (to an extreme) that I would put his comments on a "corporate" website.  I think he thought I was trying to get him into trouble or something, I'm not quite sure as the profanity-laiden emails did not make the exact issue very clear to me what exactly the issue was. 

But what I did learn is something I should have already known -- blogs ain't private. Whether it's via a auto-syndication engine or a search engine, what you write publicly is -- well public.  It's is the blessing and curse of the blogsphere.  A blog someone might toss off in 15 minutes one Saturday afternoon could end up one day being quoted 2 years later on some major site. 

While the incident definitely was unpleasant for me, it was a good wakeup call too to be more aware that what I write might be taken very differently than intended and may get out there a lot further and wider than I had ever thought.

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E3 Journals

Games everywhere!

Friday, May 20, 2005 by Frogboy | Discussion: WinCustomize News

So many games, so little time.  We've been at E3, the world's largest trade show for video games of all kinds.  And this year is a big year for games as Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft announced their next-gen console plans.

Here are links to our TotalGaming.net coverage:

 

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How can they miss DesktopX

A "widget war" article that neglects Stardock (again)

Thursday, May 19, 2005 by ZubaZ | Discussion: WinCustomize Talk

Link

Mike Elgan disects the history of Apple's Dashboard but his version goes MS Active desktop --> Konfabulator --> Dashboard.

Whatever.
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Icon-A-Day, Icon # 88 - 93, Optical Disks

A Bonus Pack of Disks, just for fun

Thursday, May 12, 2005 by mormegil | Discussion: Icons

Icon 88 (Optical Disks)

I have missed a few days, so I wanted to make up with a bonus pack. While Windows includes all these types of disks inside the the Shell32.dll I do not know of anyway of changing them on a system level, other than a hack. Hopefully IconPackager will find a way to do so before to long.

One more reason to do these disks is that CandyBar for OS 10 supports them. So just for fun, and because they are all pretty simple, I figured what the heck. So with no further ado, I give you the Optical Disks.
 
Step 1:

So this will be pretty simple, First we get ourselves a nice copy of the CD icon.

 Step 2:

Now we copy over one of our pens from any one of our file icons that we have made already.

 Step 3:

Now we create two simple rectangles, set a 50% Transparency setting; one in a color and one white for a nice line.
 
Step 4:

Now we simple use the Text Tool to add the type of drive access to the colored bar, making sure it is placed behind the glare.


This finishes of our first of the Optical Disk formats.


 Step 5:

Now we need one more element to make the rest of our Disk Types: a pencil. This we start by mocking up a pencil with some mesh rectangles.


Step 6

Now with our standard Mesh Tool Techniques we start molding our pencil.

 Step 7:

More mesh editing...

Step 8:

And still more mesh editing.

 

Step 9:

Last we use our Shadow and Reflection techniques to finish off our pencil.

 		 Finished Second Icon.

Note: The rest of our types we do with exactly the same steps, but changing the colors, and the text.

 


Download the Completed Icons here.

 

Now that we have a all the common Optical Disk types, we will move on. We have a few other bonus Disk types that we will polish off before we move on toward the end of our pack.

Read the other Icon-A-Day Articles: (Icon-A-Day Index)

Check out the CorelDRAW for Skinner Index, for links to all the related Video Tutorials.

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
All Images and Text in this tutorial are © Paul Boyer, and may not be reused without written permission.

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Apple sucks iBalls!

Tiger gives me few more reasons to stay a dog person.

Tuesday, May 10, 2005 by mormegil | Discussion: OS Wars

Today was a great day of disappointments for me on the computer front. After much pondering, for reasons I will explain, I decided to take a trip to the Apple store and Upgrade my Mac to OS-10.4 "Tiger".

I have had a Mac for 3 years now. I spent $3000 on it, and have used it probably a grand total of maybe 80 hours. This is my own fault. There is nothing really wrong with it. It is just that I find myself using my PC. I'm a windows fan, even though that's not something most people will admit. As a skinner and a customizer there is much more possible in windows. This, along with a long list of reason why I don't use my Mac much, have caused it to be a bit neglected. Today I wanted to remedy that. So with much to-do I drove to the mall - a place I try to avoid at all costs - went into the Apple store and to my surprise managed to get a copy of "Tiger" without any of the sales people talking down to me. (This is something that I have become used to at the Apple store). $129 later I left the mall and aside from a great disappointment when I find out that Wetzel Pretzel is out of Grateful Garlic pretzels (I cried only a little), I start home with joy in my heart, and a fancy pull string bag full of OS-10.4 .

On a side note; I could not help but notice that the nice Apple black box with the big brushed silver X that Tiger ships in is almost an exact duplicate of the 1990's teaser poster for "Malcom X". Coincidence..... well, probably.

Now I get home, and the annoyances begin.

First a bit of background. I bought my Dual G4 Power Mac Right when OS 10.2 had just been released. 10.2 was a big improvement over 10.1 so I was pretty happy with it. It did what I wanted and I do not use the Mac much so I never updated to 10.3 "Panther". I still had iMovie, and iPhoto, and iDVD installed. They had been updated several times and worked fine (when I found the time to play with them). A year or so ago they quit giving away iDVD and I hardly noticed. I still had the version that came with 10.2 and I had never actually used it, so I did not care much. I remember Steve Jobs saying in his Keynote at the time, "You can still get iMovie, and iPhoto, and iTunes, for free, and if you buy "iLife" you get iDVD as well, plus a bunch of crap." OK so that's not quite a quote, but that was the gist of it. Shortly after that I became quite busy with my new job and much more interested in the PC side of things again. In short, I quit paying attention to what was going on with Apple. Sure I caught the highlights, "Garage Band" comes out and "Dashboard vs. Konfabulator", but over all my Mac attention span was about as short as the amount of time that my Mac was on. This, I discovered today, was a bit of a mistake for me.
 

First problem:

I get home and open the box. Humm...nice box, nice disk, look an intro manual, pretty... Apple sure knows how to polish the products. Oh and nice a trial version of "iWork". Well I won't install that because I have office on my PC and I will never use it. I take a break to backup a few things and all is well. I have never done a nice clean install and I still have OS.9 something installed so the Mac can run in classic mode - the wife needed to be able to run that free version of ProTools. I was never a fan of OS 9 and she doesn't do much sound editing anymore, so I want to dump that. That's right, this calls for a Clean Install. So I slip in the disk. humm how to do a clean install? Oh look you can launch Disk utilities form the installer, sweet! I'll just wipe the main drive... That was simple, Apple sure is cool... ok now I just click install. Seems to be working fine. Boy Apple sure is cool, Microsoft could sure learn how to do an installer from them... With that I take a 20 minute break while it installs.

I come back, run thought the pretty 3D Cube setup wizard and bam, OS 10.4 is up and running. That was pretty simple. Well, lets get everything set back up. First I'll reinstall the few apps I have. "Candybar". Oops.. dose not work in OS 10.2. Well free patch form Panic solves that. Now Pixidex. That one seems to work. Nice. That's all I need I guess. Hey wait a sec, were is iPhoto... oh, hey iMovie is gone as well. Hummm, perhaps I need to download them from Apple... I quickly run system update. "No new updates at this time" That's odd... Then it hits me: could it be that they don't ship with the OS anymore?.... Nah... well... Then I look in the back of the Intro Manual and sure enough "iLife Applications do not come with the OS, but can... bla bla bla....." Don't come with the OS. F##K. This make me realize that I have just deleted 2 of the only useful programs on this $3000 dollar paper weight. Now now, perhaps I can download the older free versions... I'll just look around the Apple web site a bit... Humm perhaps I will look a bit better.... Humm nope........................................well. If I remember right iLife is only like 50 bucks, maybe I'll just upgrade.... What... $79 dollar... F##K... With that I leave momentarily to rant to my poor wife of the injustice I am being put through. About a hour later I come back more collected.

Now, it seams that I have lost some software. I am a bit pissed, but I don't use the iApps often except iTunes, and that one primarily on my PC. So I decide to suck it up an live with it. I suppose if I cared enough I could do a fresh install of 10.2, then upgrade it to 10.4. But I don't quite feel up to that.

Second Problem.

I have just moved, and one of the things I wanted to do in my new house is set up a nice central file server for myself and my wife to use. Now the Mac seems the perfect computer for this; it's BSD backbone is very stable and you can leave it on for months with very few problems. Perfect, I can finally use my Mac. Or so I think. As it turns out, there is no simple why to share a drive on a windows network. Now luckily I have some UNIX friends and they teach me how to get into the smb.conf file and add a "sharepoint" and I get it working. There is an entirely different annoying Apple story here, but I am already running long so I will keep it to myself. Lets just say that I was hoping 10.4 would make SMB sharing easier. In fact, one of the reasons I upgraded was for the "Improved" windows file sharing. Well as it turns out they did not change a thing when it comes to sharing outside of your home folder. Well, that's disappointing. So thanks to a great little app from HornWare. http://www.hornware.com/sharepoints/ I can get OS 10.4 sharing as well as it did with 10.2, I send the programmer 10 buck for saving me the trouble of having to remember how to edit the SMB files and I move on.

At this point the file sharing is precisely as useful to me as it was in OS 10.2 and now that I think about it, precisely  the same as it would be if I just installed Free BSD. But then I would not have the pretty polished Mac graphics would I?
 

Dashboard, or as I like to call it, "The Great Anti-Climax"

Moving on. Now lets check out these cool new apps. First, since I am a skinner and I was one of the first people to start messing with DesktopX, I have to check out DA, DA, DAAAA, Dashboard. Now Dashboard was getting a lot of airtime, because on the surface it seams a blatant rip-off of Konfabulator, which is more or less a Mac version of DesktopX. (Another debate all together; we won't get into it here). Well the good news is that Konfabulator should not have much to worry about. Dashboard pretty much sucks. Now this is my opinion only but I can tell you what: I'm not impressed. Sure the graphics are nice, sure they have some nice widgets. BUT, and this is a big but, YOU CAN NOT LEAVE A WIDGET RUNNING ON THE DESKTOP. They only appear on the "Dashboard". The dashboard is essentially a full screen window that darkens the rest of the screen, and with nifty effects pulls you widgets out to be visible. So essentially you are task switching to reach them. At this point you can just switch to the real app. I realize that this means that if you want to see any one Dashboard widget, you have to show them all. You can't, for example, leave a to-do list up on you desktop and work in an app; its all or nothing. This should be Apples slogan. OK OK, but the widgets are so pretty.... So are Konfabulators. Well, that is also disappointing, but perhaps I am overlooking something. I go to the Dashboard configuration. Humm what can I change... I can change the keys it uses, I can set up hot corners to call up the Dashboard. That's it. OK I'm still annoyed by this..... Lets move on.

Now still sticking with Dashboard I click on the Icon in the dock and it slides up this nifty tray of widgets. All of the provided widgets are very polished and work well. I try a few and am impressed by their cool spinney 3D effects that make it so the configuration for the widgets are on the back of each widget. You have to see this to under stand but its pretty sweet and makes me long for Longhorn to get its compositor working 100%. Hear that Ian? That sadly is about all that impressed me with Dashboard. When you go to the "More Widgets" webpage you find some nice widgets and some crap in about the same mix you find at WinCustomize or the Konfabulator gallery, but nothing to rock my world. Needless to say I don't need a "Next Episode of Stargate" countdown widget. That's what my PVR is for. One last thing of note: not all widgets are free. This is not surprising, but something to remember next time you see a pay suite or theme.

Well...one last bitch about Dashboard: I was assuming that since Apple makes dashboard and they have full control of the OS that it would be very well integrated. So I check out the weather widget. Its pretty sweet. Nice graphics. New shiny weather Icons, nice. Let me change the zip from the default of Atlanta to mine. Look there the 6 day forecast, that's nice. I continue playing with Dashboard and when you call up the bottom tray these little X's appear in the corner of all the widgets. One of the early problems we had with DesktopX is that people did not know how to close objects, so I am glad to see that they have included that. So I close the weather widget. This turns out to be a bit of a mistake. It seams when you close a widget it is as if it was never run. That's right, when I run the widget again I have to change the zip, position it, as well as set it to show the 6 day forecast, all over again. Now I don't know if this is the case with all the widgets, but it seems that Dashboard only remembers settings for widgets that are running. You can't open and close them at you leisure and expect to keep the settings you have established. You have to leave them running ALL THE TIME. Well like I said, you cant have them visible while you work in any other app, so I guess it is not really a drain on memory, but let me just say if I made a widget for DesktopX that behaved like that I would get flamed with complaints, and I would deserve it.

On the bright side of Tiger I was impressed by the new "Smart Folder" there - pretty cool. "Spotlight" is a damn fine desktop search and Automator is very cool. I would love to have something like that for Windows. Are these nice enough things to make me start using my Mac more? Not at all, but they are fine examples of Apple polish.
 


As far as I can tell leavening a Widget open, while you work
in a application, like I am doing here with DesktopX. Is imposable with Dashboard.
 

Well, it is late, and I have been ranting too long. I shall try and summarize my OS 10.4 "Tiger" experience.

The loss of my iApps was my fault for not reading the manual first but still, come on Apple, this is the kind of bait and switch that you would be screaming at Microsoft for doing, and everyone would be screaming for court action. Luckily Apples market share is so small that they can get away with things like that. (Well lucky for them at least). I assume that eventually I will crack an buy a copy of iLife that I will never use and Apple will be a little closer to being popular enough to start suing.

I am sure there have been tones of usability fixes and such, but the one thing that I was looking for, better Samba sharing, was still not there. Come on Apple, can't you have one of you programmers take a day to come up with a GUI for the smb.conf file? I have been able to right click on a folder or drive in windows and share it since windows 3.11. You just took Samba for UNIX, can't you afford to at least give it a pretty face?

As for Dashboard; very pretty at first glance. For a skinner or widget user it is pretty much useless. I will be keeping Konfabulator on the Mac and have already begun the search for a way to disable Dashboard. This is a great example of how an idea can be taken, yet not understood at all. I could be wrong. I'm sure some people out there are wild about Dashboard. I can just say I'm not one.

Lastly, Apple, what's up with the 10.X updates? I know that the "Big X" is sexy but this naming convention is about the biggest cheese on the planet. I am sure that you will come out with 9 point release of OS 10, but come on Apple, if Microsoft charged for point release you would wet your pants. Just give up on the X and move on. If you are going to charge $129 at least make it a .5 release. At this rate it is going to cost me 700 dollars by the time we get to 11. All I know is 10.4 is now running on my system and I spent $129 dollars to "Upgrade" to an operating system that works just about as well as the old but has less useful software. I keep hearing people say that "Tiger is the OS of the future". I sure hope they are wrong...

 

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Icon-A-Day, Icon #87, Removable Drive

The Last of the Default Drives

Sunday, May 8, 2005 by mormegil | Discussion: Icons

Icon 86 (Removable Drive)

We have one last Default Drive type: the Removable Drive icon. This used to be used most often for Zip Drives, Jazz Drives and the like. These days it is most commonly used to represent USB Drives, and most common of these are Thumb drives.  So I decided to go with that for our icon today.

I did not want to use some a real Thumb drive. Instead I am just going to make something up that will match the rest of our Icon-A-Day drive icons.  Off we go.
 
Step 1:

It is going to be a bit hard make this look good, since Thumb drives are usually longer than wide, and will be a bit thin to fill the Square icon. As always I start with some rectangles to start shaping our drive.

 Step 2:

Once I have my forced perspective working I start with the USB Connection, using some mesh fills to give it a metallic look.

 Step 3:

Now I give the connections some detail, the contacts inside the plug, and two "holes" in the plug.

 
Step 4:

Now we go back to our Mesh Tool and start giving the body of the drive some detail, bevels, and changes in the grey as we have used in the rest of our drives and hardware.

Step 5:

Now we give the drive body a brush texture with our Interactive Transparency Techniques.

 Step 6:

To make sure this icon matches, we give the metal body of the icon a nice gloss.

Step 7:

Now we need our standard Reflection.

 Step 8:

Last we give the drive a nice Shadow.
 Finished Icon Image.
 





Click here to download the finished icon.
 

That brings us to the end of our standard Drive icons, but I still want to do a few more Bonus Drive icons. I also want to use these on my Mac so I am going to make sure we included all the CD and DVD types. I think we will try and take care of those next.

Read the other Icon-A-Day Articles: (Icon-A-Day Index)

Check out the CorelDRAW for Skinner Index, for links to all the related Video Tutorials.

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
All Images and Text in this tutorial are © Paul Boyer, and may not be reused without written permission.

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Suffering from Longhorn or Tiger envy?

Upgrading Windows with Object Desktop 2005

Thursday, May 5, 2005 by Frogboy | Discussion: OS Wars

With the recent release of MacOS X "Tiger" and Microsoft talking about the next major version of Windows, code-named "Longhorn", Windows 2000 and Windows XP users might be feeling a bit of tech envy.  If so, Stardock has a cure for those OS blues in the form of Object Desktop 2005.

Object Desktop is actually a collection of OS extension utilities designed for Microsoft Windows 2000 and XP. When installed, users gain a host of new features that often go far beyond what future operating systems will provide.  For example, Object Desktop 2000 was allowing users to "skin" the entire Windows UI, including the Start bar, before Windows XP was even a twinkle in Microsoft's eye.  Object Desktop was providing features such as alpha bended shadows under windows before Apple had even coined the term "Aqua" to describe the MacOS X interface.  And today, while Apple and Microsoft are playing technological leap-frog, Object Desktop 2005 has features that offer a glimpse of what may be coming to an operating system near you.

One of the features of Apple's new MacOS X Tiger operating system is "Dashboard".  Dashboard allows users to add "widgets" that provide useful functionality and information on the desktop.  Object Desktop 2005 not only has widgets but allows them to live on the desktop full time.  Hot keys are available to show and hide them as needed but they can also live side-by-side with your desktop icons.  It was Object Desktop that delivered enhanced, end user created, mini-application functionality onto the desktop long before anything similar appeared on Windows or Mac in the form of DesktopX (one of the programs that makes up Object Desktop).  DesktopX, however, doesn't stop at just widgets. Users can literally design their own desktop environments with it and export them for later use or to share with others.

Another hot-topic in the "OS Wars" has been Avalon.  Avalon is a new display system that debuts in its full form in Longhorn. It allows all kinds of interesting effects to be achieved on the desktop.  But Windows users need not wait until Longhorn to get a small taste of what Avalon can do.  Object Desktop 2005 has WindowFX, a program that lets users scale windows on the fly, create transition effects and window morphing, shadows, and a host of transparency options.  And as the Longhorn beta approaches, Stardock is already at work to make sure Object Desktop takes full advantage of new features available in Longhorn for developers.  For users who are looking to have their Windows desktops appear similar to Longhorn today, they can do that with WindowBlinds.  WindowBlinds allows for enhanced visual styles to be applied that can change the look and feel of Windows completely. It also speeds up the drawing of windows when they're being moved and resized over the base "Luna" visual style in Windows.  It's so powerful that Alienware recently licensed it to create their Star Wars based desktops. 

But Object Desktop isn't just about making Windows look and feel better. It's about productivity and functionality.  A new program in Object Desktop 2005 is RightClick.  RightClick lets users replace their desktop right-click menu with one of their own creation that can have links to programs, system information, virtual desktops, and much more on it.  It can be brought up at any time by hitting the Windows key and is powerful enough to be used instead of the Windows Start bar (and includes an option to hide the Start bar). Major updates to other programs that make up Object Desktop along with the inclusion of a new Object Desktop LaunchPad help make Stardock's award-winning package compelling to power users and administrators alike.

All told, Object Desktop includes nearly two-dozen programs and has won numerous awards including PC Magazine's Editor's Choice Award.  It's $49.95 for the whole suite and entitles the user to a year's access to ObjectDesktop.net where new programs and updates to existing programs to Object Desktop can be found. With Longhorn looming, that means users of Object Desktop 2005 will be able to get the best of both worlds and not have to worry that their Mac-using friends have something over them.  After all, the upgrade for Mac users to Tiger is $129, over twice as much as Object Desktop costs.

Product: Object Desktop 2005
Developer: Stardock Corp. (www.stardock.com)
Price: $49.95
Requires: Windows 2000/XP.

Transform the look and feel of Windows. Thousands of different WindowBlinds visual styles are available for free to download. Modify your existing desktop or create your own completely new designs Get the most out of your video card with these morphing effects and add widgets and enhanced icons to your desktop. Change the user interface, icons, and more

Save your desktop as a .suite file to share with others or to use later on. Use Theme Manager to manage all your skins, themes, and icons from a single location.

Assign hot keys to launch programs, websites, and system commands

Add widgets to your desktop, virtual desktops to your Start bar, and change the desktop right-click menu and much more.

 Object Desktop users get a full year's access to free updates to all the Object Desktop programs and new programs that get added.
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