Been playing with an internal build of DesktopX 2.21 over the weekend. It fixes some bugs that we had been running into in our quest to create higher quality widgets and themes.  It probably won't affect the end user experience but for those people making widgets and themes, the changes will make their lives easier.

I know I seem obsessed with the whole widget thing lately. That's mainly because I am obsessed with the whole widget thing lately. I don't know what it is, but I just love the idea of being able to create really neat visual things on my desktop that are of my own creation that don't involve hours and hours of work.

Take fancy icon labels for example. I created a DesktopX object that has really fancy text labels under it. It's very flexible and you just right click and clone them and change the image as often as you want and can create a whole desktop of very nice big "super icons" with text labels.  Check out the article on that here. I did this in about 5 minutes though. Only 30 or so lines of VB Script and now people can have icons on their desktop with nice icon labels under them.

On the down side, fanboy wars are starting to brew. This is a real bummer because well, it usually means we get beat up a lot. One can trace the whole "WindowBlinds SUX!" stuff back to when msstyles first started coming out. It wasn't enough for some of those users to go with their choice. No, they had to go out and trash WindowBlinds.  It's simmered down quite a bit but anyone who's been around can remember what it was like for every WindowBlinds news item or whatever to have a small army of msstyles advocates insisting that WB was crap and that the reason it was so popular was because people were "stupid sheep" (it couldn't possibly have been because it was faster, used less memory and has tons more features but I digress).

So now I fear we're starting to see the same thing in the widget arena. But this time we have an idea what causes this phenomenon: When a product (freeware or not) has no official home base where its most..passionate users can hang out, they tend to end up on community sites. And so they try to turn those community sites into their home base and drive off all others. 

That sort of thing led to a recent blow-out on Aqua-Soft. Aqua-Soft is one of the most superbly run net communiteis around. But as we've seen here on WinCustomize even, from time to time the community itself can get out of hand. 

I've written previously how much I like the various widget programs. Samurize, Avedesk, Kapsules, and of course DesktopX (and on my Mac I'm a registered user of Konfabulator). Like I said, I'm totally into this stuff. But I worry you're going to see the same sort of nonsense we saw with the msstyles vs. WindowBlinds stuff.  Rather than respect the choices people make, some people would go out of their way to attack and harass others for their choices and opinions.

But then again, when I go into the lion's den and talk about these things, I feel like anything I say is going to be distorted into something awful. Here is a rule of thumb: If the website gets less than 1 million unique visitors per month, then someone who makes a living doing software is only on there because they care about the product or service personally. There's no business justification to hang out on some niche site talking shop - especially on labor day. Believe it or not, people who make a living writing software actually do care about their software just as much as the "freeware" author.

But like I said, I'm really into the whole concept of doing cool stuff with your desktop. I think with Longhorn coming that we're just at the beginning of the cool stuff that will become possible. I am hoping all these programs gather followers - a rising tide lifts all boats. But if it becomes a battle of niche programs, they will all remain niche programs.

On a sadder note, my pet frog "Kermit" died yesterday. We had had him for 5 years so we were pretty bummed out. He had had a long life though. He was one of those little African frogs that people (5 years ago) could buy at the mall.

We had him in the original aquarium with his roommate Gary, the snail. Now Gary is alone and we have to figure out a way for him to find..um "food" now that the frog isn't there anymore. That leaves us with just Cuddles (the box turtle I've had for the past 18 years).

So next week we'll be starting to roll out WinCustomize v4. First to our admins/moderators and then slowly on out to WinCustomize subscribers and beyond. Lots of good stuff in there.

Also next week we'll be releasing The Natural Desktop. Imagine taking incredibly cool looking wallpapers, a huge volume of custom sound tracks for outside sounds, and tying them all together with logic that looks at the time of day, weather conditions, and time of year. The screenshots won't do it justice since it's really the overall "experience" (visual, audio, and subtle workings) that make it so cool. But you'll hear more about that this week.

Have fun!