Skinning Aero!

If you have Object Desktop, you can get it now.  If not, you can purchase Object Desktop here.

IF you have Windows 7 THEN you should definitely get Object Desktop RIGHT NOW (though it’s pretty awesome on XP and Vista as well).

What a fantastic week on Impulse this week.  We had some great releases, some pre-orders go up, and we are ending out the week with are weekly Impulse Buys. 

The new releases for this week have been:

• Tropico 3
• FIFA Soccer 10
• Crysis
• ARMA 2
• The Dracula Files

Updates included:

• AI War to v2.0
• Demigod v1.19

New Pre-orders:

• Sacraboar with 25% off and early beta acccess

This weekends Impulse buys!

$19.99	$6.99	$14.99
$14.99	$14.99	$28.99

It’s been several years since WindowBlinds has added a new skinning format.  For those of you who are techies, WindowBlinds has UIS1 and UIS2 (User Interface Specification). 

UIS2 is extremely powerful and lets users go wild with the design. 99% of skins use UIS2.  The downside is that skins are very hard to do (and even harder to do nicely) and there can be compatibility issues with programs that don’t adhere to the GUI conventions of Windows.

UIS1 is a lot less powerful but faster.  The borders and title bar are a fixed size and the title bar buttons can’t be moved. They’re a bit easier to make but still involve quite a bit of work. They have essentially perfect compatibility but most skinners don’t do UIS1 because they’re nearly as hard as UIS2 and and lack the power.

With WindowBlinds 7, a new skinning format gets introduced: UIS0.  The idea here is to make it very very easy to make skins and the skins only apply to Aero (which means for XP users this won’t apply since there’s no Aero to apply to).  Since the Aero design can’t be “touched” skinners can’t really easily hang themselves.

Don’t get me wrong, you CAN make an ugly Aero skin with UIS0.

Besides being easier to create UIS0 skins, UIS0 skins are Aero which means that any weird program that makes the assumption that Aero is running will be fine.

  vs.

The biggest goal, however is to make it a lot easier to make skins again.  Terrific skins like Aero Metal and Aero Midnight (by Vstyler for Stardock Design) are designed to look just like Aero but with metal textures or be pitch black.  It’s just as hard to make those skins (actually even harder since people are going to be comparing it to the default Aero) as any “original” skin.

Now, people who like the Windows Vista/Windows 7 default look but simply want to enhance it in some way can do so with a minimal of fuss.  Textures, colorization, and other new WindowBlinds 7 effects can be applied to Aero just like any other skin.

The beta of this is due out this week for Object Desktop users.

With ObjectDock 2.0 on the horizon, I wanted to take a fresh look back at the current version of ObjectDock Plus, as it is still an invaluable tool for any desktop.

The folks over at the PC World blogs grabbed a copy of Fences from Stardock, and gave it a run through on their desktop.  The quote below sums up everything pretty well.

“It wasn't five minutes after installing this program that I realized I'll be using it for the rest of my computing life. It's that good.”

PC World

Business Hacks on Bnet.com, also has a quick video demo showing Fences in action.

See the video here.

Here’s my desktop.

Right now running very clean. Windows 7 64-bit, WindowBlinds 7 running a textured Vector-Cell skin, DeskScapes running with a texturized wallpaper, and Fences simply hiding all my desktop clutter for a nice clean desktop.

Yesterday 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:

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.

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.

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.

Fences 1.0 was released this week, and I wanted to put up a quick tutorial so new users can get setup quickly without much fuss.   Grab the free download here, or via Stardock’s Impulse.  Installation should take just a moment and then we can start getting our desktop in to some type of order.

Lets create our first Fence!

Right-click your mouse and drag an area across your screen with the size you want your Fence to be.  It doesn’t have to be perfect, you can adjust it later.  Release the mouse and you will be asked if you want to create a new Fences, say yes, and name your Fence.

Now you have your first Fence.  How easy was that?

Now you can proceed to drag and drop icons from your desktop into the Fence, and that is where they will be contained. 

If you need to resize the Fence, just place your mouse on the edges and you can drag and resize to your liking.  Right-click and select “configure Fences” for more advanced options.

If you want to completely clear you desktop of icons, just double-click to hide them, and double-click the desktop again to show them.  You can also right-click an individual icon and exclude it from hiding. 

So all you have to do now is create as many Fences as you like, and get your desktop clutter-free!

Ever wanted to see what people who actually bought a given game or application truly think of something? Impulse now supports customer reviews – from within Impulse, users can rate their games and applications on a scale from 1 to 5 stars.

Rate the games and applications you have within the Impulse client

The explore page on the ImpulseDriven.com website as well as within the Impulse explore tab will now display customer ratings.

Because of the ease of rating, the developers of Impulse believe that the programs will receive a much more accurate rating than what has traditionally been possible and in addition ensures that only those who actually have the program can rate.

Fences 1.0 was released this week, and now it makes the Download of the Week on MaximumPC.com! 

“Desktop maintenance is perhaps the most frivolous form of organization, but it’s just as important as matching together pairs of socks in your clothes dresser. Fortunately, there are free applications like Fences to help aid the chronically disorganized and transform their desktops into grids of art. Previously in an beta, version 1.0 of Fences has just been released by Stardock, with improved compatibility for 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows. Even if you're already rocking Windows 7, we encourage you to give this utility a try.”

Check out the feature at MaximumPC.com!