From the people who brought you Fences, Start8, ObjectDock, DeskScapes, and countless other amazing programs comes a new one that will transform the way you use your PC: Groupy. At any given moment, people have a lot of windows open.  Maybe it's a few Explorer windows, a couple of Excel spreadsheets, maybe a a Word document or a PowerPoint presentation.  Maybe they're working with Adobe Premiere and After Effects and a few other windows.  In any event, dealing with all t...

I have purchased and renewed OD for several years now. This year, I decided NOT to renew. I figured I'd wait to renew (or repurchase) when I was able to upgrade my OS. Also, I haven't changed my theme, or Icon Package for roughly 5 years. So, to me, it just made sense to hold off. Today I was forced to reinstall Windows. When I went to reinstall OD from archives, there was nothing there. So...I don't know if I misunderstood, but I was under the impression that I owned OD and all t...

I just dl'd the free trial version of this new program.  It's even better than the old one and works great on Win7!

Hi guys! I came to ask the proffessionals in DesktopX if this idea is possible.  The plan is to give each object in the scene a property to change it size depending the position in the screen. If somebody know please let me know how. THanks in advance!

We’re getting a steady stream of new objects in.  Back when DesktopX was first made, we included a bunch of cool objects made by Paul Boyer.  That was 10 years ago.  So for DesktopX 4 we really want to revisit this with what can be done using today’s technology. Stay tuned.

We need your help. For DesktopX 4 our goal is to clean up DesktopX and put it in a place where we can start to build up on it again in a way that is, to be candid, economically viable. So to start here is what we have in mind specifically for DesktopX 4.0: New objects It has been a long time since we have updated the content in DesktopX 4. To many of you, this sort of thing isn’t that big of a deal. But to end users, having animated...

Keyboard Launchpad is a marvelously useful utility. But its UI is pretty long in the tooth.  I was wondering what sorts of features and changes users would like to see? Would anyone like to sketch together ideas on how they’d like to see its user interface changed?

As the new year approaches, we’re starting to look forward to the DesktopX 4 beta. So what are the goals of it?  Well, to be honest, the goals are pretty modest: Strip out the parts that are difficult to work with and build it back up. Stripping it down First off, DesktopX comes with several plugins that I have asked to be removed: Any plug-in that doesn’t work on Windows 7 with UAC on would be removed.  The existing DesktopX library would be renamed ...

I love using DeskScapes. Even back in my OS/2 days I enjoyed having my desktop background be something more than just an image.

It really wasn’t until the last couple of years that the desktop itself got hardware accelerated and thus could have cool desktop effects without it slowing down your computer.

The video above is a tour of some of my favorite free animated wallpapers (Dreams).

I’ve talked a great deal about how cool WindowBlinds 7’s new Aero skinning feature is.  But one of the other major new features of WindowBlinds 7 is the ability to tap into the huge WindowBlinds library of skins and make them work on Windows 7 without modification.

But it’s easy to claim how great WindowBlinds is at skinning Windows 7, here’s a live demo of WindowBlinds 7 in action.

Since my return to being the Product Manager of Object Desktop and the programs that make it up in October, one of my jobs has been to re-evaluate where skinning is today and try to take the products in the direction I think skinning is going. Object Desktop 2010, launched this month, is the result of some of this thinking – at least, as much as we could do in a couple of months. My mantra for skinning has basically been: Make it useful, target power users.  I’m not interested in ...

One of the areas that got optimized that is hard to demo is the speed of skin changing.  While not a huge deal for most people, being able to change skins quickly is something that we’ve been working on quite a bit for WindowBlinds 7. This video is of the beta that will be going up this week for Object Desktop users. There is no editing. This is how fast it really is.   [Watch Screencast Video]

WindowBlinds is the engine. The skins are the content. UIS1 and UIS2 were the two skin formats WindowBlinds has supported.  UIS1 for “simple” skins and UIS2 for complex skins. Both were designed in an age where few people wanted their systems to resemble Windows classic let alone Luna (the Windows XP look) . Windows Vista’s Aero changed that.  Because (like me) think Aero looks good.  But Microsoft severely limited the customization options of Aero for reasons ...