Click for a teaser screenshot

This is actually a bit scary, because you can load sort-of … anything To prove it (you’re gonna love this … I should take a video, really, but it’s time for bed, so this will have to do): check this out Beat that!

So yeah, I have this control written from an earlier project which creates a task list with live preview images. When I say “live previews” I mean actually live, like on the Vista Alt+Tab: if there’s a video playing, you can watch it in there (of course, it dies a horrible death on XP, but I have other code for that).

As a side note the TaskBar2.panel stuff is from the TINS release I made months ago, there’s several fun .panel files in there … but you have to load a bunch of the TINS assemblies first, I didn’t distinguish which ones, I just did:

Of course, in .Net 3.5 the RichTextBox has the ability to go ContentEnabled="true" which should allow those things to be actual controls you can click to switch active task, right-click to get a task menu, etc (although I haven’t tried that yet). We might just have to upgrade

Anyway, it’s past time for bed, so I’ll preempt complaints about how this isn’t ready for release yet with this quote:

I don’t have to take this abuse from you; I’ve got hundreds of people waiting to abuse me. — Bill Murray, “Ghostbusters”

If you’re interested in computer desktop software, or how metaphors apply in software interfaces, or in “cool” programs that wow your friends … you should check out BumpTop. The bad news is all they have is a slick little demo video, and unless someone hires them to continue working on it, there’s no guarantee this will ever be a product. The good news is that they have a mailing list you can sign up for if you’re interested in beta testing it.

Honestly, I think the icons need some work in this, they’re ridiculously generic in the version he’s showing off in the video (as in: no way to tell one PDF from another PDF), which for me would completely break the program. I would want a faster easier way to “open” the piles without waiting for the pile plugin menu to show up (and I’ve never been a big fan of fisheye menus). That said … the way the drag-select works, and animations for draggins groups of files, and the stacking and pile plugins … are very cool, and just the sort of stuff I’d like to add to the desktop.

DeskOps is my latest home experiment … it’s a desktop application that allows you to view multiple folders as “bands” on the desktop, but it doesn’t force you to go to the desktop to access these bands. You can use it as a desktop, as an app launcher, for quick access to downloaded files, or to project folders that you’re working on … Think of it as a desktop, but with organization and quick hotkey access.

Just to be clear, this is a standalone app, and although it’s based a litte bit on the geoShell look, it’s actually a .NET application which requires the .NET 2 Framework… (more…)

Well, if you’ve been following along on my series of posts about my fantasy GeoShell/Desktop/Task Management development projects, you’ll probably be a bit dissapointed by this screenshot but that can’t be helped.

The bottom line is, I really still want to do all the things I’ve talked about over the last year or two, but I’m still bogged down in real life and not making a whole lot of progress. However, I have whipped together a first-draft of my desktop application …

Have a look at that screenshot, and let me know what you think. Imagine you can have as many of those little semi-transparent windows as you want (ignore Miranda and Rainlendar in the corners). Imagine they gravitate to each other when you move them around, and you can stack them, and they snap-to each others edges. They also collapse to their title bars when you want them to, and if they’re stacked, when you collapse/un-collapse them, they act something like the Outlook sidebar, so they all stay visible. Basically, the intent is that you could leave these on your desktop, and summon one or all of them to the top at the press of a hotkey to launch applications, or just copy files to a work directory.

In the screenshot, the icons come from plugins, so you can have any kinds of items you want … the ones in the screenshot all come from a FolderList plugin, so they represent files/folders and you can drag-and-drop things to/from them (and onto the app shortcuts) at will… but you could easily have a ToDo list, or an RSS feed or something …