grayhaze

Reply to Review of Object Desktop in PC Zone Magazine in WinCustomize Talk WinCustomize Forums

To prevent anyone making fools of themselves when responding to the magazine about the article, I thought it might be a good idea to actually let you people see the article itself. I know this is sort of illegal, and it will probably kill my bandwidth, but here are the scans of the 3 page article itself: Page 1: http://grayhaze.com/scans/pczonepage1.jpg Page 2: http://grayhaze.com/scans/pczonepage2.jpg Page 3: http://grayhaze.com/scans/pczonepage3.jpg The stuff about Ob

Reply to NOTICE: Off topic Posting in WinCustomize Talk WinCustomize Forums

I agree that it's a real issue, and a problem inherent in a non-branching forum design. If the forum were to have the ability to reply to individual responses, and then hide those 'tangent' branches of the topic to the casual viewer, then this wouldn't be the huge problem it currently is. It took me a while to find the responses to the topic I posted in the 'PC Zone' thread, and it's not fun to have to wade through off-topic responses just to continue a discussion you started. It's a bi

Reply to EVERYONE: TAKE A CHILL PILL... in WinCustomize Talk WinCustomize Forums

Brad, I took a chill pill and it's brought me out in all these purple-blue lumps. I prefer lime green, so could you make a custom colour version of the pill?

Reply to Review of Object Desktop in PC Zone Magazine in WinCustomize Talk WinCustomize Forums

That is actually the entirety of the article bakerstreet, at least so far as Object Desktop is concerned. The rest talks about graphics cards, monitors and suchlike. The main problem I had with what they said was the idea that Object Desktop, which in itself is a collection of several independant applications, is painted with such a broad brush, and with little real knowledge of the product or the skins available. They seem to think that simply installing Object Desktop on your system m

Review of Object Desktop in PC Zone Magazine in WinCustomize Talk WinCustomize Forums

I just bought the June issue of the UK magazine PC Zone for the big preview of Half-Life 2, and happened to notice a mini-review of Object Desktop in an article about making your computer 'cool'. Quote: "Products such as Stardock's Object Desktop can be downloaded in a flash, and allow you to tweak and fiddle with the default appearance of Windows by reshaping its look and feel. The vast bulk of replacement frame, images and cursors are garish, blatant copyright theft or jus

Reply to Please, do something about it! in WinCustomize Talk WinCustomize Forums

Lady Akasha, you're not going to get punished for saying what you think and being honest. However, I am starting to wonder if maybe adni's English is a large part of the problem here. I know in the past his comments have been misunderstood as a result of bad wording, and I've had pretty heated arguments with him as a result. Let's just take his word for it that this was simply a misunderstanding and leave it at that. I'm sure the ratings debate will continue apace anyway...

Reply to Please, do something about it! in WinCustomize Talk WinCustomize Forums

As others have pointed out already, it should be remembered that 4 is by no means a terrible rating. In an ideal world, there would never be ratings of 10 for submissions, because nothing can ever be absolutely perfect . You should be happy with any scores over 5, and only slightly concerned with a 4. In my mind, a really good submission should have a rating of 7 or 8, and only rarely a 9. If an author continually gets rated with only 10s, then are those ratings truly a good representation

Reply to Please, do something about it! in WinCustomize Talk WinCustomize Forums

If you think Stardock somehow owe you something for the publicity your skins generate adni, then you're skinning for all the wrong reasons. You should be creating desktop enhancements for your own pleasure, and anything beyond that should just be a bonus. When you start creating skins and wallpapers just to get high ratings, then you need to ask yourself wether it's an ego thing. The fact is, you're the most downloaded skinner at this site and that alone should be enough to convince you

Reply to Request for comments from skin authors in WinCustomize Talk WinCustomize Forums

Stardock already have an application to skin the logon screen thundr51. It's called LogonStudio and can be found here: https://www.stardock.com/products/logonstudio/ Some would argue that as the logon screen isn't technically a part of the Windows desktop, it's not something that WindowBlinds should have to deal with.

Reply to Overdog worship in WinCustomize Talk WinCustomize Forums

Microsoft are indeed introducing PDF editing in the next version of Word, and they claim that you can edit any PDF you download from the net while retaining all of the graphics and layout. Hopefully that doesn't include password protected PDFs which are protected as such to prevent people editing them.

Reply to Overdog worship in WinCustomize Talk WinCustomize Forums

Teddy!!!!

Reply to I need an advise: Graphire2!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! in WinCustomize Talk WinCustomize Forums

I have the first version of the Graphire, and it suits me fine for the occasional hand-drawn work. If you're more of an artist than a graphic designer though you're probably going to want something a bit bigger. If you consider that the small size of the Graphire tablet is meant to represent your entire screen, things can get a little cramped when working at high resolutions.

Reply to Overdog worship in WinCustomize Talk WinCustomize Forums

Give it a rest you two. This isn't a chat room, so don't treat it like one. Unless you've got something to say on the topic of the thread, take your idle chatter to MSN or ICQ. And you wonder why people are sick of you...?

Reply to Overdog worship in WinCustomize Talk WinCustomize Forums

I can't believe the way some threads get hijacked by childish squabbling. Oh, and Linux sucks. As for worshipping Microsoft, I'm not sure I would agree. It seems to me that the younger generation talk about nothing but how all software should be free and open source blah blah blah. I don't actually recall ever hearing a technical person of any age group blindly singing the praises of Windows either.

Reply to Request for comments from skin authors in WinCustomize Talk WinCustomize Forums

As for PNG support, what about those people who don't use SkinStudio, and those of us who use Fireworks which uses PNG as its native file format. It would be tremendously helpful to be able to edit my images directly and see the results without having to re-optimize and export as a BMP or TGA every time.

Reply to Request for comments from skin authors in WinCustomize Talk WinCustomize Forums

Make more use of the 'SmartButton' concept. Fix and update the currently existing plugins (eg. the QuickLaunch doesn't actually work for most items in the menu!), and add some new plugins based on user ideas.

Reply to Quick Question to all dem designers...... in WinCustomize Talk WinCustomize Forums

That's exactly why I like Fireworks bakerstreet. I can keep the elements of my skin as freely editable vector shapes, but use bitmap effects such as shadows at the same time. As you edit the vectors, the effects update in realtime. Take a look at my WindowBlinds skins. They were all made in Fireworks using vector shapes with various blends and shadow effects. If I decide I want to go in an change the size or shape of any elements of the skin, I can do so instantly without having to recr

Reply to Quick Question to all dem designers...... in WinCustomize Talk WinCustomize Forums

Each to their own bakerstreet. I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree on this one. I still stick to my guns and say that Fireworks rules for intricate skinning where vectors really help out, whilst retaining the functionality of a decent bitmap app. If I were to ever try making a wallpaper, I'd probably use Photoshop. Until that time though, Fireworks is my skinning tool of choice.

Reply to Quick Question to all dem designers...... in WinCustomize Talk WinCustomize Forums

I was referring to the vector tools provided by Fireworks. Photoshop has only relatively recently introduced vectors, and they are still quite primitive in their capabilities. A lot of the shape creation possible in Fireworks still needs to be done using selections in Photoshop. You clearly love Photoshop, and you're not alone. It's a fantastic tool for creating and modifying pure bitmap images, but it lacks in certain areas which I find very useful in Fireworks. I still use both applic

Reply to Quick Question to all dem designers...... in WinCustomize Talk WinCustomize Forums

By the way, when you say 'Fireworks is good for what it does, but it has never really been a graphics creation app', you couldn't be more wrong. It's always been aimed squarely at the graphics creation market, as that's exactly what it is - a graphics creation app.

Reply to Quick Question to all dem designers...... in WinCustomize Talk WinCustomize Forums

It's true that Fireworks is primarily for web graphics creation, but that weighs very heavily in its favour for skinning too. It's perfect for creating precise compact images, especially when using the fantastic vector tools which put those in Photoshop to shame. I admit it's probably not the best for the creation of overly complicated 'painterly' wallpapers, but having used both Fireworks and Photoshop extensively in my job I can wholeheartedly recommend it for someone who likes the id

Reply to Cleansing scream... in WinCustomize Talk WinCustomize Forums

/me slaps Frogboy firmly Get a grip on yourself man! /me runs very fast

Reply to Skins and button text in WinCustomize Talk WinCustomize Forums

The problem I face is that my machine isn't on a domain, so I have no idea how my skins look to those who are. The majority of comments people leave on the issue are along the lines of 'I'm on a domain and the Start menu looks broken'. That doesn't really help us tremendously. As for the button text, I too have been noticing this problem on certain recent skins. I wonder if it's a change introduced in WB4 that causes this, or whether there's a common error being copied between skins som

Reply to What's going on??! in WinCustomize Talk WinCustomize Forums

If it's any consolation, JavaScript seems to have stopped functioning entirely on my browser. One day it worked fine and the next absolutely nothing worked. A bit of a problem as I'm a web designer, as I can't even test my own sites in IE! I've yet to find out the cause, and in the meantime I have to use Mozilla for most sites. Computers are such a pain.

Reply to Some Mac site ripped Dangeruss :( in WinCustomize Talk WinCustomize Forums

How many times does it take Youji? Nobody did any 'flaming'. That's just another misleading term like 'rip' anyway. 'Flaming' is generally taken to mean throwing personal insults at someone on a public message board without just cause. No such insults were made. The only messages posted on that site were valid claims of theft, and requests to remove the offending item. Obviously some people were a little better in their wording than others, but nobody resorted to the kind of childishnes