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 to do more help on "Advanced Skinning"; things like colorization, icons and animations, but this is a good start. Also, I put it into the same format as the DesktopX docs and it looks very polished.

Alberto managed to find some more bugs in the Media Player which was a pain. It's sometimes unfortunate when an experiment suddenly becomes an important creation as then all the flaws in your hacked building are exposed. I suppose it's like building a car prototype and then people being surprised when it doesn't drive perfectly even when it looks good. Never mind - I can get onto that.

I managed to quickly do a corporate demo incorporating a sidebar and web content filling the rest of the screen, It looks quite cool (for a demo). I managed to create a nice "pin" type option for toggling locking and autohiding of the bar, with the web browser filling the rest of the screen.

One of the things I've really wanted to do is look at replicating what's coming in the Longhorn bar in terms of collapsable sections. I managed to do this for this demo, so the client can see how we can easily integrate their content into a practical EVERYDAY user experience. Once I've nailed this I think I'll work on my own version with all the modules I've done. It should be a great way to cram a load of content into a small area. I've decided that I'm going to replicate the visuals from the Aero Sidebar page (http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/dnaero/html/wux_topic_sidebar.asp) to get this spot on. I'm looking forward to that.

Anyway, today I'm going to deal with the media player and try to get onto the Aquarium Premium theme.