Singularity: Corner Shortcuts

Working on the graphics and concepts of the Singularity for LiteStep theme, I realized that the three shortcuts present in the upper-leftmost corner (shown in the first pane of the image at left) would be hard to find a purpose for. Thinking of what SacRat might say if he looked at this ("too many controls! Too complicated! Controls with similar functions should be grouped together! Group functions by what they control!), the realization dawned on me that making this shortcuts to typical LiteStep E-vars would be really random. That's what the fold-out shortcuts above the system tray should be used for.

The way the theme currently works, the upper 30px and the left 30px of the desktop are reserved for the taskbar and system tray. When an application window is full-sized, it covers up the graphic VWM, precluding mouse-click access to other virtual desktops. In the 2003 incarnation of this theme this function was compensated for by the inclusion of buttons above the tray (then at the upper-right corner of the desktop) directly accessing each virtual desktop. Since the tray was moved in this remake, this location is no longer available for shortcuts.

The little SacRat that sits on my right shoulder then piped in "Make the existing 3 shortcut buttons into 4 and have THEM access different virtual desktops!" This was quickly countered by the Goat-Demon which sits on my left shoulder who barked "Make it more complicated, Mortal!" Needless to say, I gave in to the virtual SacRat. The second pane in the image above shows what resulted, 4 buttons to quickly access different VWMs when an application is maximized. Of course, VWM switching will also be an option users can select for the configurable corner mouse hotspots, although not everyone will select that option, necessitating an alternate method of switching desktops.


Next focus: Get all current theme shortcuts functional. Also need to put together the lower-right corner control module for media controls. I want it to be able to control either WinAmp or iTunes (since the iTunes module is available, and I haven't touched WinAmp in years).

REQUEST: It's becoming time to start scripting this thing. Anyone interested in doing some scripting for this? I can do it if I have to, but I really prefer not to. I'm kind of a sloppy, inelegant coder.

SYSPodcast #8 released

Checkout the podcast here.
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Skinning News

• Happy Thanksgiving!
• New Tutorials at Skinyourscreen.com by Nerio and KaRaZyJeW.
• A Windows Skinning Primer at Wincustomize.
• liqachu interview at Customize.org.
• 7zip new version.
• Nerd Proliferator.
• Good Color Harmony Generator.
• SNES powered tunes, baby!
• DotWidget RC.
• PodXP widget engine download available.
• Free goodies for Photoshop.
• Linux ain't just a terminal

User Feedback
Stardock CEO writes in some good, some lame points of comparison between WindowBlinds and StyleXP.

Polymerase for AstonShell

The new theme I gave a preview of in the last blog entry has been released. Every striving for a scientific name, I entitled it "Polymerase," the enzyme that polymerizes additional nucleic acids into a strand of DNA or RNA.

Download Polymerase for AstonShell here.

Download Polymerase for ObjectDock here.

New Aston Theme: Polymerase

I've been quite ill for about a week, some nasty kind of bronchitis/laryngitis/cold combo. In addition to playing MegaMan Battle Network 3: White way more than I should, I started to whip together a theme for AstonShell. It's been a while, and I wanted something dark and shiny. After putting it together I found a suite called Xenon by a Russian (i think) skinner named Vlad. He's got a really nice looking site, too. You can find it at vladstudio.com. Kind of defeats the purpose of releasing a theme if someone else's already got something very similar, so i'm heartlessly modding it at the moment. There's a clock module in the screenshot towards the lower-right which will be more of an emphasis. The goal is a shiny black theme accentuated by chrome accents and periodic splashes of blue or red.

Thank goodness the Thanksgiving holiday is approaching this Thursday. Will have some time to recuperate, some time to theme, some time to make web-templates, and some time to work on another SYS podcast (also working on the first Podcast Wasteland podcast with a good friend). Hope to release a simple version of the theme before the end of this week.

Singularity: QuickLaunch

The original Singularity theme had a few button-tabs at the left edge of the screen to access custom menus like the quicklaunch, games, options, etc. Previously, the bpopup2 module was used to permit the creation of this quicklaunch with a secondary popup. Andymon's xPopup, however, one-ups this by permitting multiple popup styles via one module. It also included a feature for creating text-less quicklaunch popups in either horizontal or vertical formats.

As a big fan of AstonShell, I'm very fond of "Toolbars" a.k.a.: wharfs a.k.a.: docks at the left and right screen edges. They're a great way to access common shortcuts. Rather than using the vertical-menu methodology common to other shells, the Aston toolbars use staggered layouts: that is, the first level of shorcuts are vertical, but the second-tier comes out of the first horizontally. I wanted to employ something similar in this theme, with the tabs representing the first-tier, and the fold-out shortcuts coming out horizontally. Tossing some stuff around in Photoshop, I came up with this prototype picture to the right. Wanted it to look like the smaller bud pictured first opening up. Didn't end up as successful as I had hoped, but it's still fun to look at in its own right. Seems to work, too.

Perhaps I'll make a vertical version as well, just to suit user taste.

VMware Player and Front-Row for Mac

The VMware Player/Fedora Experience
Last blog I reported that VMware Player was turning out to be a fun toy. The Browser Appliance that VMware makes freely available turned out to be a stripped-down Ubuntu Linux distro set to their own login, to be used exclusively for "safe" web-browsing. Turns out they left the Synaptic package manager in it, meaning you could install The GiMP, KDE, media-players, games, web-editors, and the thousands of other freely available Linux programs for completely free.

Last night I tinkered a little further, using a hack found at Hack-a-day.com to create my own operating system environment for VMware Player. Took the challenge, jumped in hacking the VMX file of the Browser Appliance virtual environment, and used FreeDOS to clear the virtual partition. Once the virtual partition was cleared I was able to load my favorite Linux Distro, Fedora Core, into the virtual hard-drive/partition. It takes a while because the VMware Player is emulating another complete computer under Windows, but it all pulled up just fine and installed. Right now I'm running the Yum updater to update all existing file packages, including the kernel, and also install KDE, my preferred linux graphical environment.

It's been kind of bizarre working in a full-fledged linux environment in a window in Windows. VERY nice, though, especially for web-development or network integration. The cool part is it doesn't have to make a separate hard-drive partition: VMware player makes a file that is interpreted as a partition. Here's a screenshot of a dual-monitor setup on my crappy Toshiba laptop running Fedora Core 4 in a VMware Player window on the right. It's using the Yum updater to update every installed program (one of the beauties of Fedora Core... imagine typing one command and having Windows update Photoshop, Microsoft Office, Windows, Roxio, Illustrator, and Windows Media Player all at once):

Front-Row Hack for Mac
One of my good friends in the lab I work in wanted some help installing a hack of Apples new Front-Row program on his several-month-old iMac G5 (old enough that it doesn't come with Front-Row by default). For the uninitiated, Front-Row is Apple's much more enjoyable response to Windows Media Center Edition. It doesn't yet require a TV card, although it does come with an infrared remote, and is a lot more pleasing to look at and use. It's not commercially available, either, and the only way to obtain it legitimately is buy purchasing a brand new iMac G5 (new as in released just a few weeks ago).

It's release is both a blessing and a curse. Front-Row is a great piece of software that functions nicely. The fact that Apple released it only on new iMac G5's (not even its high-end G5 towers), however, has come with a sharp sting to millions of dedicated Apple fans who bought their iMacs or other Apple products just a few months ago. Not releasing it commercially was another dunce move who's intentions can only be guessed.

To counter this, several sources have released patched versions online that don't require the infrared remote in order to function. After helping my buddy install it, all I can say is "WOW!" It really is amazing to watch. Mac's are full of "got-your-attention-now-don't-I!" features, like Expose, the Dock, and Genie effects, and the Dashboard Ripples. Front-Row is another one of those things that has to be seen to be appreciated.

VMware Player hack

I've been playing with VMware's virtual PC environment, VMware Player, lately. It's free, and you can get it here. In brevity, VMware makes software that will permit you to run multiple operating systems simultaneously. Their full-fledged package is rather pricey (even for students it costs more than $150). They've been gracious enough recently to release VMware Player, a freeware version that will permit you to run precompiled environments, or environments saved using the full version.

What does this mean exactly? I guess the best analogy would be a Nintendo emulator (I prefer Nesticle). Nesticle creates a virtual Nintendo in Windows, emulating the processor, the hardware, etc... You can download hundreds of the old Nintendo games as ROMs, pre-packaged little files that contain an entire game. These are then loaded into the emulator where they can be played. Now the beauty of this system is that you can save the games wherever you want, the software takes a snapshot of the processor running the game, which can be started up quickly the next time. VMware Player works the same, except it emulates an x86 processor and snags a bit of physical RAM from your computer. This means you can run Linux on your Windows desktop.

There are a variety of precompiled OSes/environments you can use. I've settled on the smallest one offered by VMware, the Browser Appliance. Turns out the Browser Appliance is actually Ubuntu Linux, and it includes the Synaptic Package Manager, so you can dynamically add additional software from the net easily (via download). There are literally thousands of packages available, and within an hour of plinking around I was able to install the KDE desktop environment (Gnome Desktop is the default), the Xfce desktop environment, the GiMP editor, and a couple different Office-type programs. (Here's a hint: the root login is "vmware" and the password is also "vmware"). It generally works for what I need it to, and although a tad slow, the command-line works the way it should, meaning I can actually use the FTP commands. I'm so used to doing this on my Mac, that using the crippled crappy commands included with the Windows command-line becomes an exercise in frustration.

Anyway, there's a hack available that will let you install whatever operating system on it that you want. That's the functionality of the full-blown VMware software, for free. This is on the to-do list for the evening. I'll let you guys know how it goes.

http://www.hackaday.com/entry/1234000153064739/

Singularity: LSXCommand, & Goodbye TiddlyWiki

LSXCommand Have been working on getting the shortcuts and LSXCommand up and running on the left side of Singularity.

The fold-out shortcuts (quicklaunch, etc...) are still pretty messy looking, so I'll show those later. Here's the LSXCommand area, though:
There are two versions in the image. The top was the original sketch I threw together in Photoshop. I wanted it to look like the top and bottom panels kind of swung-out from the center, but the pointy areas to the left and right just looked crappy, didn't match the rest of the theme. The other is approaching the final version. Again, the swing-out panels are present, as are struts to attach them to the rest of the structure. The sharp lines on the inside of the panels, however, strike me as unlike the rest of the theme as well: not the sweeping curves and rounded shapes. It may undergo another revision, but it's getting closer to what I want.

Will be working on the shortcuts/quicklaunch things next.

Goodbye TiddlyWiki
All the LiteStep-based content of this blog was originally hosted on a TiddlyWiki-based site on my Skinyourscreen.com server. I've decided to move it off-site to Blogger because it's just a better solution. TiddlyWiki's a great program, and I still recommend it to anyone, it's just cumbersome to use for blogging or for image-laden content. A server-side solution was certainly the way to go, and so I demoed a few options for blogs like b2Evolution and WordPress. On an unadvertised portion of my site, however, b2 and WordPress accumulated a fantastically bad array of referrals designed to point users to sites dealing with Viagra and the like. I opted out of that. Blogger is free, I can customize the template, and it permits comments and track-back. We'll try it for a while, anyway. So far, I'm duly impressed.

Microsoft XPS vs. Adobe PDF

It appears that Microsoft is officially entering the portable document market, as screenshots of the XPS save-file dialog appear on the net. The XPS format-previously-know-as-"Metro" makes use of a zip container with XML file content, and is intended to compete directly with Adobe's PDF file format. You can find out more about the XPS (or "XML Paper Specification") here.

XPS appears to address several inefficiencies with the popular PDF portable document format, such as reducing file size and creating an XML-based structure. I still have to ask, however:

"Microsoft, why?"

I believe their XPS format will not penetrate beyond 2% of the portable document market, and here's why:

• The PDF format portable document is ubiquitous. It's already the de-facto standard for academia and business alike. It's easy to use, make, and view. Of course, I am coming from an academic perspective on this, but I'd wager that more than 60% of the PDFs circulated daily on the net are from scientific and professional journals, like Science, Nature, Cell, and about 500 more that show up yearly on the impact-factor rankings. Whenever someone publishes a paper, review, news-brief, or article in one of these, it's converted to a PDF format. The magazine Science likely circulates over 50,000 PDFs in a day, conservatively (the actual figure may be more than 10 times that amount). That's just one journal! Science has an expensive infrastructure it's worked on for years to hone the production and information dissemination process, a significant investment in time and funds. To believe that a new format will simply sweep over a previously entrenched one is folly, even from a company that owns the principle market-share for operating system. For a magazine like Science to replace this infrastructure is just not a feasible option. The submissions processes for the major journals generally entail submitting PDF formatted documents, as well. The journals' heuristics then tease out the essential bits of info (like author, date, title, and abstract) and do some basic pre-formatting before presentation before the editors, and before being parcelled out to peer-reviewers. This is an automated process performed directly upon the PDF upon submission, and is a part of the costly infrastructure in place to facilitate a paperless process for the manuscripts submitted. XPS simply can't begin to compete with the well-established PDF format.

• XPS isn't a vast improvement over the PDF format. If it were dramatically smaller, easier to parse, easier to send, easier to make or use, it might present a contender against PDF. However, the XPS is a marginal improvement, at best. File sizes for documents may decrease 10%. You'll have to download and use entirely different software to make 'em and view 'em. In short, there's real reason to switch to the XPS format. Sure, it's cute, it's new, but there's really no reason.

Now compare this to the Internet Explorer vs. Mozilla Firefox foray: Microsoft had the upper hand in market-share and market penetrance. The Firefox browser was a heck of a lot more innovative, however, with its plugin architecture, skinnability, tabbed-browsing, and enhanced security. Unfortuantely, Internet Explorer has become synonymous with "open-portal for malicious hackers to override and zombify my computer, whilst filling it with spyware and other security threats" (OPFMHTOAZMCWFIWSAOST, as I like to call it). This helped get Firefox well on its way to obtaining a significant market-share very quickly. XPS just doesn't have the innovation and drive to push past PDF.