DesktopX Developers and users beware - IE7 may well cause some DesktopX widgets to fail because of it's new functionality.

That's not to say that all will be affected by this, but many of the widgets relying on RSS feeds for their data may struggle. The issue is that IE7 kindly interprets RSS feeds and displays the data in a more visually friendly format. While this is to be applauded, it does have implications.

Where a DesktopX widget uses a Web Browser control to load RSS data, and subs...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/click/rss/0.91/public/-/1/hi/technology/3974081.stm

Well, obviously the election is about to be decided and Europe will have to deal with either 4 more years of what we know from Bush, or build a new relationship that will apparently take us in a new direction.

The fact is that in Europe we don't have an informed view unless we take the take and are sufficiently interested to understand all the U.S. domestic politics. Needless to say, most of us (including myself) don't care enough to do this. However, in a recent poll of citizens of European ...

Last year the BBC had a wonderful series of programs called The Big Read which had the aim of identifying the most popular books of all time amongst the British public. Famous public figures from politics, music, film and TV eulogised about their favourite books of all time and then the public voted.

One of the books which did very well is a series called His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman. These ranked 3rd of all time. Whilst it is to be expected that there would be a bias towards more mod...

Working on The Natural Desktop....... a tale of natural pleasure and pain  The history

The Natural Desktop (TND) has been a long time in planning. Sometime around February whilst chatting with Matt Crockett (Tiggz) he sent me a demo of something he was working on called WOW (Window on Weather). It blew me away. Obviously now we are all familiar with Matt's talent, but at the time it was a breath of fresh air in a DX world overrun with too many average weather and calendar objects.

On ...

DesktopX - How to ... ....... make a calendar What is this about?The aim of this document is to show you how to take a sample object and customise it to make it your own. In the process it will guide you through the script so you get a better understanding of how it does what it does.

 Getting Started This guide is based upon the object you can find here. The first thing you should do is download this zip file. Inside there is an exe file. If you right click the DesktopX icon you c...

I'm blessed - I'm paid to devote my life to Stardock and working to help it keep it turning out more products and skins that is humanly possible for the number of staff. Well, I'm paid for a working day - lets just call the rest love and blame timezones.

However, sometime skinning just annoys the hell out of me. I tend to restrict myself almost exclusively to working with DesktopX on the grounds that I don't have time for anything else. I've been lucky to be involved with the product since be...

Recently I published a "work in progress" version of an iTunes object (Link) which shows how DesktopX can be used to interact with applications installed on your computer.

This article is designed to introduce people into how this was achieved so that they can try to use DesktopX to do similar things. It is not designed to be an exhaustive guide to scripting, nor an exhaustive guide to interacting with iTunes. Rather, it is a simple introduction which specifies how to achieve some of the basi...

Yesterday I was pointed to a SysMetrix skin that created a cool looking crack in the desktop and was asked if this was possible. Needless to say I said yes and then worked out how to do it.

Anyway, it turned out to be fairly easy using some of the standard effects available in most graphics packages. For the purpose of this I'm using Fireworks.

Here's how to do it.

1) Create a new image with a transparent background and then draw a random shape on it.


2) Clone this object so you ha...

First of all apologies for the lack of updates. My mind is all over the place at the moment with move planning etc. There's so much to do especially when i think I may be in the US in less than 4 months! So much to do, so little time. Anyway - thanks to everyone for their tolerance!

Updates on key things:

Marvel: DX work (and most other things) are done now so soon we should be in a position to sell this

ImpressionCreator: Angie's done some really great work on this. It's really frustra...

Well, a mixed day yesterday. The weather has closed in which always makes things seem misearable, but now the modem on my laptop has packed up. This is a real pain as obviously it's not just a case of buying another cheap modem, plugging it in and using that. It's definitely not the line so It's a call to the manufacturers. Just as I get my machines running in tune this happens.

As for work, that was far more successful. I finally finished proofing the SkinStudio Docs. There's still potential...

Well, a mixed day yesterday. The weather has closed in which always makes things seem misearable, but now the modem on my laptop has packed up. This is a real pain as obviously it's not just a case of buying another cheap modem, plugging it in and using that. It's definitely not the line so It's a call to the manufacturers. Just as I get my machines running in tune this happens.

As for work, that was for more successful.

Well, this has been quite a week. I have been working on a laptop since before Christmas, because I fried some components in my main machine (how stupid am I - kneeling on carpet, building up some lovely static while building a machine!). Some replacements arrived (nForce2 motherboardwith IGP, and Athlon 2200+ for the sake of economy), and I built the machine only to find that the HD was dead. Thankfully nothing was really on there, but I still had to order a new one and wait for that. Well, tha...

OK, so I seem to have failed miserably to create a post to a "Custom audience" and get it visible so I'll just post this one. I don't really care who reads this one after all - there are no secrets!Well DX is really rolling now - I'm impressed with how much has changed from 2.0 - 2.1

Here's my quick thoughts and current plans:

Ian's combo and list box replacements - cool. This will really help overcome MS not implementing a good comprehensive control set.
We do however, really need to rep...

I couldn't help but to blog this!

I'm doing some consumer research, part of which involved me going through the Dell purchase process. Whilst doing this I was asked some questions which prompted this article:

"Dell Computer Corporation is a US Corporation and is therefore subject to all US Export Laws and Regulations. In view of this, please answer the following 4 questions for US export compliance purposes."
OK, fair enough I have no problem with this. Questions 1 through 3 - all reasona...