DesktopX 1.1 is nearing..

DesktopX 1.0 was released last July. And work on it hasn't ceased since. DesktopX has emerged as a very popular desktop customization program. However, Stardock has been developing it to move beyond being merely seen as a cool and easy way to add desktop eye candy.

With v1.1, DesktopX takes its first step towards DesktopX NG in which COM objects and DesktopX objects are combined.

In v1.1, a user can use DXScript to create objects that talk directly with COM objects as well as other DesktopX objects. A few samples are included such as a website news reader, an object that reports whether it is day or not, and a temperature object (give it your area code and it will tell you the real time temperature).

The big advantage of DesktopX is that these things use up virtually no additional resources. For instance, DesktopX displaying the temperature uses less memory than a stand alone program doing the same thing because it's using COM objects already in memory.

A could create a desktop that has various Windows Media PLayer objects on it. Or how about a DesktopX object that plays a particular Internet music channel that they then distribute? Since Quicktime is a COM object, imagine a DesktopX object that is designed to play a particular website's quicktime movie (or movie of the day automatically). All these things become possible and easy to do.

Here's a real world example:
Some websites feature a "Movie trailer of the day". A user could create a DesktopX object that automatically grabs the link to that movie trailer of the day and has a single button to play it on the DX object. The DX object would probably be less than 100K because it's using the Quicktime COM objects already bundled.

Another example would be a DesktopX object of a particular person in which you could send them email or instant message them. Users could email back and forth their Personal object that has all the information they want to include with it.

In the past, these kinds of things would require users develop their own VB application or C# or C++ app. But DesktopX takes care of all the grunt work, the developer just picks what COM object to use and the VBscript (or Javascript) to specialize it for their use.

The goal is to let users and developers have total control over how both local and Internet content is displayed and distributed. Right now the world works with very large monolithic COM containers (3 examples of COM containers - MS Word, MS Excel, and Internet Explorer). These containers are made up of dozens of COM objects and are made to be very generalized. DesktopX 1.1 and especially the future DesktopX NG lets users deal with these COM objects individually to create either customized desktops or simply objects to send to other people that are specific to the needs of their users.

As mentioned earlier, there's really no limit to the number of beneficial uses of something like this.

One of the fun examples Stardock is going to make soon is an object in which the user types in their email address and it will display in real time how many downloads all their skins on WinCustomize.com have received that day.

An internal object Stardock is going to create will be a bandwidth object that queries the bandwidth use of Stardock's various servers from .ASP pages and then displays it as a simple number in Megabits per second.

Another useful but simple object is an Emergency object. Basically this object will be invisible but if there is some sort of emergency message needed, the system Admin types it onto a admin ASP page and the object reads it and can speak the actual text (using the text to speech object built into Windows that few know about). So if there is some emergency, users can react to it more quickly.

DesktopX 1.1 won't be publicly available for some time yet. But 1.1RC1 is available on Object Desktop right now (www.objectdesktop.com). Object Desktop is where WindowBlinds, ObjectBar, WInStyles, IconPackager, etc. all are from.