Still listening.  Thanks!

Another impotrant thing... It would be great to see *.avi in the list of Supported Formats (Object -> States -> Appearance -> Image) to use the real animated textures in the widgets/gadgets skinning...

Also a few words about DesktopX E-mail Notify plug-in...

Certainly this is very useful addition! But it doesn't alow us to check incoming messages on Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo (and on a few other popular Web Mail Servers). 

At the same time the similar plug-in which included to the Wincustomize Toolbar can do this! So I think that DesktopX Developer Team can make us very happy if they finally decided to modify the DX plug-in and it will work no worse than the similar part of WC Toolbar!

Let's wait...

P.S. Hey Martin! You've wrote a great article!

I just started with DesktopX, but one thing I'd like to see, is a way for DesktopX to use Themes that are marked "for this or that resolution ONLY". One in particular is the LCARS Theme by HG_Eliminator which can be found here.

I browsed the entire gallery, and you have no idea how many great-looking Themes I had to discard from consideration because they were only for certain resolutions that I cannot/do not wish to use.

If only that was possible,self-resizing DXthemes. 

That would be even better than hoping for all themes to be RI in the future.

I would have a downloading-gasm.

Well how about a submission rule:
"All submitted Themes need to be Resolution Independant to be considered for Moderation."

I am Admin on a website for the Logitech G15 keyboard, and I do Overlays for said Keyboard.
Request Thread
G15v1 Thread
G15v2 Thread
And I have very strict rules for user-submitted Overlays, probably as a result of this,
most of the Overlays there, were done by myself.
The rules however ensure that every posted Overlay is easily usable for anybody,
regardless of their printer or experience with graphic programs.

IMHO.. resolution dependency has held back DX more than anything.

Nuts.. that was one i really want - in Acad programming there was a way to "place" items into the dialog box.

Things like "ROW" "COLUMN" "WIDTH" etc.  Being able to modify this screen even with a layout file of some sort would be awesome.

One other item that i would love to be able to work on is a "dynamic" change to the task icon, so i could make a gadget with say a weather icon that shows the current weather in the icon, or even the current temp.

I think there are TONS of posts out there with bug fixes and issues that need addressed.  I just spotted this thread, and will have to work out some new ideas.  Most have to do with ease of re-use of code, componants, etc. 

Also.. .one of the major things is to have a much easier way to access "code".  I had plans for this with desktopx.info but that just didnt work out, the idea of a "script repository" and an "integrated" way to import these into dx EASILY would make coding so much better.  Things like Read/Write/Create INI Files, reading drive space, etc.  I know a lot of things have been made into DLL's but these are not easily updated, a web-based repository would be aweome, and having this supported by SD would make it that much better.   Id be more than willing to help put together some scripts, etc.

Wow I must post in this EPIC thread

I've been at DX for about 4 years, last two were pretty intense. I am glad many bugs I noticed have already been reported here and I'm also glad that there are many great suggestions made.

Well I'd like to give my 2 cents so lemme begin:

- make DX not murder CPU as soon as something a bit larger or a group of objects has to be moved/resized/transparentized(i made that last one up but u catch my drift).

- please fix at least the problem of controls not showing until their parent is dragged

- improve script editor - maybe add tabs and other tools that other editors have (i love notepad++)

- maybe enable gadgets to wipe their data off the PC as soon as they're closed (for instance when running them from a memstick)

- it would be great if we could use blur and similar techniques to make our objects more attractive (windowblinds style), it would also be cool to be able to access windowblinds skin data easily and not have to be of Vad_M's caliber to do so

- make some more plugins for lets say: catching global keyboard keys imput, mouse movement (maybe ability to move mouse) and all mouse buttons as well as current mouse coursor's state.

- maybe enable already completed gadgets to communicate with eachother

(if any of those is utter nonsense I'd like to excuse myself as I am a total self-learner)

To addres this:

Well this is really more up to the author than DX because as someone said DX coders freestyle a lot so I would say it is impossible or way too hard to achieve. However if the whole idea with templates is adopted than maybe programmers with insufficient knowledge on how to make something resolution independant will be able to do so by using the appropriate template.

I concur. A central properties and script editor would be nice, so I don't have several windows open to work on different objects.

DX has functions to help make your theme rez-independent; take for example Quentin's resolution independent theme. More examples/templates wouldn't hurt, but it really is up to the author to do the work.

That's what I'm talkin' about. It's one thing for users to upload a bunch of templates to the gallery, but each one has a different way it needs to be tweaked, and each user has a different level of experience which means they may or may not know how/what to tweak. A standardized set of templates would be essential and I propose Martin be put in charge of implementing it.   (Excellent suggestions overall, Martin!)

I remembered one more important thing right now!

Imagine that you made CPU Speed Meter (just for example) and decided to save it as a widget (or gadget). Then you run it and minimize to the System Tray. What will happen in this case? Nothing! You just see its "dead" Icon in the Tray...

But now imagine that you have some scriptable DX plug-in which allow you show in the Tray a small frame with CPU Speed and Usage instead of "dead" Icon (current weather and temperature if you've made the weather widget, incoming mails, etc..., etc...)

I'm sure this little thing (and a few other) should move up DesktopX to the next, most higher level!

Currently, everything I make is resolution independent. This has been true for quite some time now. Of course, I have recently REUPPED a few of my older non res/ind. themes which I do plan to update as soon as my site redo is complete.  

See reply #34.

I disagree...

Yes. DesktopX has all that we need to make the resolution independed themes (just look at the DesktopX Scripting Guide):

System.ScreenWidth

System.ScreenHeight

System.VscreenLeft

System.VScreenTop

System.VScreenWidth

System.VScreenHeight

System.WorkareaLeft

System.WorkareaRight

System.WorkareaTop

System.WorkareaBottom

So the quality and usability of each DX Theme depends only of its author. He (or she) can make it for fixed resolution. Or work a bit longer and make a simple script which will get a few parameters listed above to use them during theme loading for auto moving all parts of this theme to the necessary positions inside the screen.

Horizontal and vertical guidelines to help make things straighter. Or maybe a grid that we can turn on and off.   Just a thought.  

I've never seen this article earlier. But now I can say that it is really cool and easy to understand!

Unfortunate that Stardock Developers Team so rarely hears and uses our ideas, wishes and proposals...

Oops, why did nobody told me about this ?   I have my own set of templates and helper code along with a custom parser/preprocessor to go with them (to get #define/#include, script merging and stuff like that - see reply #3), so this is indeed manageable externally. You have to be careful though to be able to handle different versions of the lib running at the same time.

If you want an example of how it works, you can have a look at the standalone version of the Animator component. Most of the main templates are unfortunately much more tightly coupled and not so easy to use independently.

While having a full blown standard template library in DX would be nice, I'd hope they'd rather use their limited resources to work on infrastructure & better support for components (already in the windows script runtime) and let the community handle the scripting side.