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.

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…

That said, the big deal is my attempt to rethink what I want in “fast access” to files. DeskOps lets me temporarily add the build folder for the project I’m working on as a pane on my desktop, right alongside my existing application launching bands, and my download band. I can have some bands in large icon mode and some in list or details modes….

The screenshot just doesn’t do it justice, so if you’re curious, you should download DeskOps, and then come back here and peruse the feature list. As a side note: remember, this is beta software, there’s no installer (just unzip somewhere appropriate), and no uninstaller (don’t forget to delete the config file), and especially: not much tech support (feel free to post suggestions and comments on this post )

Here’s a partial list of what it does:

DeskOps Features:

• Creates “Bands” containing ListViews (Large Icon view, small icon view, list, details … )
• Uses Plugins to populate the lists
• Currently (only) includes folder plugin
  • Lets you drag-and-drop files from one pane to another (or to/from your filemanager)

• Lets you launch applications, folders, or files from the pane

Panes:

• snap to each other and to the screen edges
• have a roll-up feature
• have a hide button
• optionally animate in and out

• hide/show from a main panel

Main Panel:

• Has a hotkey for focus (Win+`), and is completely keyboard navigable
• Lets you create new panes (Ctrl+O)
• Has a “bring all panes to front and hide everything else” mode (Win+Alt+`)
• Lets you hide/show panes one at a time (focus, then press a number, or the first letter)

• Can bring up the config (F1) NOTE: Currently just opens the file — you need to have .config files associated with a text editor

Future Plans:

• DeskOps 1 Beta 2
  • Done Major: Config for folders
  • Done Minor: Default settings
  • Done Minor: Save panel positions
  • Done Major: Resizeable panels
  • Done Minor: Hotkeys
• Done Minor: Full Screen Focus View
• DeskOps 1 Beta 3
• Done Major: Details View
• Done Minor: Small Icons View
• Done Minor: List View
• DeskOps 1 Beta 4
• Major: Skin bands
• Major: Custom paint ListView ( transparent background, opaque icons )
• Minor: Additional details for details view (eg: emulate the default explorer view: file type, size, modified)
• Minor: Tool Tips
• Minor: Enable Grouping (on any of the details columns)
• DeskOps 1 Beta 5
• Major: RSS Links List plugin
• Major: Rateable Links List plugin (for my AI project)
• DeskOps 1 FINAL!
• All of the above, but working all at once
• A control panel for settings instead of editing the XML file
• Beyond that …
• Tasks List plugin (with thumbnails) (using grouping)
• Even Bigger Icons?

• Icon-ized Rollups (eg: show as large PNG icon when rolled up)

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 …

Things to do for GeoShell:

• Investigate Trac
• Clean up CVS project files for VC++8
• Create working MSBuild solution which works with the free .NET Framework 2 SDK (note dependence on PSDK)

• Merge Unicode sources from fei ling

Installer Problems

• Remove hotkeys for my menus
• Check for hotkeys set to Ctrl+Alt because it’s the same as AltGr which is used in foreign languages.

• Remove all hard-coded paths

Config App

• Follow this thread

Bugs

• ‘‘Hide Taskbar’‘ suddenly fails when I launch Thunderbird
• System Tray fix for Google Talk

• Lets not forget the menus, they’re still broken.

Plugin Ideas

• GeoVol2
  • Ability to select a sound-card and “channel”
• An option to show the slider parallel to the bar so it can be longer
• GeoWeather
• Parse the Yahoo site the way the Yahoo! Widget does
• Check out some other widgets for ideas
• Accept geo’s offer of a geo-sparkle plugin harness

• geoMenuRun

Website

• Jhonen says the forum can’t do polls?
• I broke the Remository, we’ve really got to get something for plugins and skins ASAP.

• Plugins section pull data from here

The three main applications under review are all free: Kapsules, dotWidget, and the newly freed Konfabulator. I’ll also mention Phatbits of which I received an “old” preview build. Of course, now that I’ve done all this comparison work, I guess I’ll have to make a commitment to review these results when Kapsules releases their much anticipated version 1, and when Phatbits goes public.

Preface

First of all, if I’m going to use a widget application, it had better do something useful, and do something that updates so often that it’s worth having it running all the time. This means no drive, CPU or memory monitoring widgets, which just show me how much free space|power|memory i have left … because It just doesn’t matter. So, my intent is to find a widget that will give me the weather forecast (not just the current weather), the current value of stocks I’m tracking, a to do/event list pulled from Outlook (I’m NOT going to enter things twice, and I have to use outlook to share my schedule with my coworkers), and maybe an RSS reader, or a web-comic downloader, and something mostly for looks like an analog clock and a calendar like Rainlendar. Rainlendar is, by all rights, one of the first, and most popular desktop widgets, but it’s stand alone, so if I’m going to run a widget application, I’d like to replace all of Rainlendar’s functionality.

Installation

I started out by downloading and installing all four applications (including the pre-release build of Phatbits). All of them feature similar, easy installers and caused no problems. Kapsules asked me several extra questions, such as did I want it to associate the .kap extension (how should I know? what’s that extension for? I just said yes), but other than that, everything is pretty much uneventful.

Out of the box, the best experience, hands-down, goes to Konfabulator. Not only did they pre-install almost all of the widgets I listed above as ones I was interested in (they didn’t include an RSS reader), but they feature a special “introduction to Konfabulator” widget which steps you through some understanding of what the application is and how it works, and they pre-configure several widgets to be visible, something that NONE of the others did (We’ll give them all extra grace since all of them purport to be pre 1.0 releases, and Konfabulator is a 2.0, but even so, the out-of-box experience is going to win over 90% of people who try these to Konfabulator before they even get to installing new widgets for the others). Konfabulator is also the only one which put itself in my start menu’s Start Up folder, and thus is the only one which will be running after I reboot.

Finding and Using Widgets

The news only gets better for Konfabulator when I tried to set up the widgets I wanted … Konfabulator is actually the only one that had the full set. I used Konfabulator’s The Weather, Stock Ticker, Calendar, PIM Overview, Combarss, and Analog Clock … and of those, the only one I had to download was the RSS feed reader. I nearly decided not to bother comparing dotWidget at this point: while Kapsules has just over 100 widgets available, and Konfabulator has almost 650 (for Windows — they also support Mac, with over 1000 widgets available for Mac), dotWidget has less than 25 available on their website.

When I started up dotWidget I found a total of 7 “default” widgets available: two analog clocks (why two?), and a few system stat widgets (eg: disk and memory monitors, because yeah, everyone needs to keep track of their disk space several times a day), one widget which I still haven’t figured out if it even does anything (dotHealthE) and one which checks gMail (no thanks). So I went to find and install some widgets so I could compare it to Konfabulator and Kapsules … I managed to find an RSS parser, and a weather one, but no stock feed or PIM. After downloading these, manually unzipping them, finding the folder where I’d installed dotWidget, and moving the folders there, i was finally able to load the weather widget, only to discover that it doesn’t do anything unless you read it’s readme.txt file and then “You need to go to weather.com and choose your local weather then manually edit the weather.ini file using that URL. It will refresh every 2 minutes.” Do I need the weather forecast updated every 2 minutes, really? Probably not, but oh, this isn’t even a forecast. At that point, I actually decided to just leave it displaying the weather for some random place, since it was already clear I was not going to be using dotWidget long term. I almost gave up installing the calendar and RSS parser I’d downloaded, after getting an error suggesting I “contact the widget’s vendor” ... but eventually realized the problem was an extra nested folder in the widget’s folder. With only three widgets successfully loaded (one displaying the weather for Yuma Valley), I finally just close the application completely.

When you start up Kapsules, the first thing that happens is that you get reminded to donate money. Not exactly the best impression, since at this point I hadn’t even got any widgets configured. The reminder does have a note on it about where to turn off the begging, so I went straight to the preferences dialog. While I was doing that, I noticed an option to “Always on Virutal Desktops”[sic] which I turned off (that misspelling will probably be gone by the time you download it, as I know Kapsule’s author will see this post ... although Kapsules did associate .kap files with the program, it turns out that’s mostly irrelevant anyway, since widgets come as .zip files which you have to unpack to the correct location (much the same install process as dotWidget widgets), and after you unpack them and move them to the right folder, you still have to double click the .kap file or use the “Add Kapsule” in the system tray menu to get them to show up (actually, I found out later that exiting and restarting Kapsules completely will add the kapsules to the directory). I was able to find and download a stock ticker (which only shows one stock, but which you can install multiple times), a calendar, clock, Outlook task list, weather and RSS readers. The Kapsules weather plugin never actually downloaded the weather, and the RSS reader simply crashed every time I ran it, so I can only assume neither of them was able to traverse my firewall proxy, although Konfabulator’s equivalent widgets never had any problems.

Resource Usage

As far as resource usage, it’s hard to compare dotWidget, since I only managed to load three widgets, which showed 13MB Mem Usage, and just over 5M VM Size. OF the remaining two, Kapsules seems to be the winner, with around 18M VM Size and 30M Mem Usage, which really does beat out Konfabulator: the six widgets I mentioned earlier create a total of seven separate Konfabulator.exe processes (one, I assume, for the systray icon), and the smallest one takes over 3M in Mem Usage, and 4M in VM Size … they combine for a total of over 40M in VM Size and 45M Mem Usage.

Results and Summary …

Despite it’s ridiculous memory usage, Konfabulator is the winner in this match up. The difficulty I had installing widgets on the other two is enough to completely offset the difference in resource usage on my system with 768MB of RAM, and the fact that I can actually “open” Konfabulator widgets from the web and have them work is quite impressive by comparison. Hopefully Kapsules 1.0 use will bring the promised full suite of high quality widgets and some improvements in usability, but in the meantime, the configuration panels in Konfabulator are several generations ahead of Kapsules simple text edit boxes, presenting full color pickers and font choosers.

The major criticism of Konfabulator is the fact that it runs multiple separate processes, although this makes it nearly immune to buggy widgets (I did find a couple that caused problems), it’s a sore price to pay… I have the feeling I’d be better off just running a whole bunch of separate applications. Rainlendar provides a beautiful calendar with options to show multiple months, cool event icons, and the ability to pull the date/appointment information from Outlook, as well as including a simple to do list, all while using less than a third as much memory as the Konfabulator calendar widget, which just sits there showing a month of dates.

Clearly, I’m not really going to give a full review of Phatbits here, the preview release I had only had two of the plugins that I was looking at, and it’s developer assures me he’s just finishing up a major (three month) feature push which includes significant changes to the way the program works, however, I will say this: running three widgets (a cpu meter, a “to do” list, and the weather forecast), it’s showing only 7.5M VM Size and just over 6M Mem Usage, which would make it by far the best performing of the ones I tried, and one assumes it will only get better as it nears full release.

As an observation, I just checked my geoShell settings, and I’m running 19 plugins (counting multiple instances of 10 distinct plugins) and showing under 4MB of Mem Usage, and under 6MB VM Size. Maybe we should be supporting slightly larger (visually) plugins, so we can get full blown calendars and analog clocks going…

Or you could try an all-in-one makeover that’s as simple as running an installer. BricoPacks are gorgeous makeovers that include every aspect of your Windows XP computer, from desktop icons and start menu, to login screen, control panel icons, Window borders and even File-Copy dialogs and wizards like the Internet Connection or Printer wizards. Nothing to worry about, they just give you a whole set of new graphics. You can uninstall them simply, and still use Windows Update and everything else… Check out the screenshots and grab one you like. Also, check out the GeoShell discussion of BricoPacks for a link to more packs and screenshots.

• My daughter just keeps getting cuter, and spending more time awake …
• School is killer this quarter: I’m taking Computer Graphics 1 and Programming Language Concepts and both of them are fairly heavy in programming.
• I’ve been falling slowly behind on my work at work which means I’m going to have to buckle down and catch up fast, because the end of the year and all deadlines are rapidly approaching. Otherwise, I’m going to be putting in overtime, and that’s deffinitely not a good thing™.
• My church has decided to revive our web project, redesign our whole website, and start moving into the digital era! We’re going to start with putting our sermon audio online each week, I’ll let you know how that goes as we make some progress. We’re also hoping to get an eCommerce site going to ease ticket sales for the many concerts we’ve been hosting over the last year or so (right now it’s aweful, as tickets are basically being printed and passed out to several stores in the area, and we have to actively manage making sure they stay evenly distributed even when sales really pick up in one place … We’re looking at Mambo for the back-end of the main site, so all of this will give me an excuse to play with some interesting stuff!
• GeoShell 4.12 looks like a simple update of the current bits with a refreshed installer, but I hate installers, and this one is going to take some work. Several of the guys in my Comp Sci courses have shown interest in GeoShell, and in helping with development, we’ll see where that leads [ ]

• WinShellEx is really taking shape, and looks to be the biggest update in GeoShell 5, apart from the work we still have to do on the config tool.

All of this leads me to conclude that the next few months are going to be very busy, and perhaps even a little insane. I’m not sure if I’ll be able to find any time at all to do programming that’s for neither school or work, so extra-curricular stuff like GeoShell … is going to be taking a back burner. Of course, I can always find time to post here, especially if I make my posts related to school or work projects [ ] ...

Well, we shall see … maybe I’ll use my mad scripting skills to automate posting [ ]

My typical answer to: “Why should I use GeoShell?” is this:

• It gives you more control over the way you interact with your computer. That is:
  • You can use hotkeys, or menus you operate with your mouse
  • You can have buttons, or just click an open space on the desktop
• You can have fancy skins, or just a plain grey bar.
• It makes your computer easier to use by providing faster ways to start and control your programs:
• You can have dozens of buttons to launch applications organized on bars by functionality, and have each function pop out of a different side of the screen
• Or you can have four or five buttons that pop out menus
• Or you can have four or five menus accessible by hotkey
• Or you can have all of the above. Any of them is faster than “Start -> Programs -> Microsoft -> Office -> Word”
• You can have hotkeys which bring a specific application to the foreground (Win+B, and poof there’s your browser, whether or not it was running before)
• Gives you more powerful options, and enables new ways of receiving and managing information
• We have a command-line plugin which is so powerful and extensible, you can use the same command bar to find a book by ISBN on Amazon, or the Library of Congress [ ], to lookup a word on Merriam-Webster, or in wikipedia, to find an MSDN article by “Q” number, or search the whole MSDN site through Google…
• We have system information plugins to show you free ram, disk space, even CPU temperature.

• And it can still use less memory and/or system resources than the explorer shell [ ]

But I can go further than that: Chording rocks.

I discovered “chording” shortly after GeoShell acquired the ability to bring up menus on a hotkey press, and this is the number one way that geoshell saves me time. Chording is essentially an extension to hotkeys …

hotkey (noun)
A key combination which can be pressed to activate a feature. Such as pressing WIN + M to minimize all your applications.
chord (noun)
1. Music. A combination of three or more pitches sounded simultaneously.
2. Computers. A combination of two or more hotkeys pressed in series.

So, I have 5 different menus configured to pop up on hotkeys. Each one has between 5 and 10 items on it, and I’ve long since memorized their names. In fact, I name the menu items generically like “mail” for my email client, so that if I decide to switch email clients (say, from Pegasus to Thunderbird), the menu items stays the same, I just change what the shortcut points to. Since the first letter of the menu is the final key of the chord, this is especially important. It means that since windows 95 and NT4, I’ve used the exact same process to launch my email: I press the hotkey (Ctrl+Alt+I) to open my “Internet” applications menu, and then press “m” to get my mail application. Of course, this extends to between 30 and 40 of my most commonly used applications (plus a “games” menu which changes often enough that I have to actually look at the menu sometimes to remember what the keystrokes are).

But we can do better: One instance is enough.

The problem with the menu system for launching applications is that it always launches the app. We have a plugin called GeoSwitch which allows you to set a hotkey which will launch the application only if it’s not already running. If it’s running, it simply bring the running instance to the front as though you’d alt-tabbed to it. My problem is, I find the chords easier to remember. So I think I’m going to have to work on a variation of GeoSwitch that lets me group my applications …

The next big thing: Information Management.

As I mentioned before, GeoShell R4 has a plugin called GeoCommandTime, which when at rest shows me the date and time. But it also hides a very powerful command box which lets me launch applications, do google or other searches, and more… and it’s inspiring me to another area of improvement.

I’ve been thinking about GeoBot (a script that runs in our IRC channel). That script does some of those lookups and actually returns the information in text to the channel, instead of a link to it. My imagination is running wild, but can’t I put some “information” structures into the next big thing?

I want to be able to make calls to “information services” which will take a query word, or phrase, or regex, and will return a result in rich text. Then, I’ll have some “information notifications” which will allow popping up an alert dialog, or an instant messenger-style fading popup window with the text on it, or putting the text in the clipboard, or even pasting it at the keyboard focus location … or even reading it aloud (*gasp*).

I want to be able to:

1. Highlight something in whatever I’m working on, and
2. Press a hotkey
3. The selected text should be automatically captured
4. And a prompt or menu should be displayed
5. I’ll select what I want from the menu/prompt (another instance of chording)
6. The selected information service will go and retrieve the information
7. Focus will be returned to the application I was in (this is very important), and

1. The results will be put in the clipboard or appended to the selection

An couple examples:

• I select your username from an email or the geoshell forums, and trigger my “GeoShell Tech Support” menu and choose “Find Email.” A service (a script?) is launched which uses the forum’s profile pages as a web service to find your email address and put it in the clipboard.

• I select a word from an email or webpage, or PDF that I don’t understand, and trigger my “Resources” menu and select “Define,” upon which I receive a definition from m-w.com in one of those alert popups that fade away after a few seconds.

I can do this now. But I want my wife to be able to.

Let’s be honest. I have most of this working already, it just takes a lot of work:

• I have a script which can go to a webpage and scrape information off it, but the script has to be carefully configured in XML with an XPath statement or a regular expression to retrieve the correct information.
• I have a control I wrote which allows me to pop up those fade-away alerts from any script.
• I have another control which lets me insert things to the clipboard from a script.

• I have the URL’s collected for automatically searching Google, Merriam-Webster, PriceWatch, Wikipedia, the Library of Congress, the patent office, the MSDN website, and so many more …

But to get the definition of a word, I have to

1. Select the text I want to search for,
2. copy it to my clipboard
3. press my GeoCommand hotkey,
4. type “mw “ (or whatever the keyword is for the search I want to do)

1. Paste the word and press enter

And even then, I generally still have to read the result from the web page that pops up, unless I had manually configured that web-scraping script for this particular website. (I haven’t, for the merriam webster site). To get a user’s email, I would have to do the same thing, except I haven’t figured out how to get past the “search results” page on the forum to the actual profile page, so I actually have to click on the search result before I can select and manually copy off the email address.

So. Who’s with me? Shall we put some information-age technology into GeoShell?

“Widgets” can be scripted for it to flexibly create mini-programs on your desktop. These widgets can then be used to do whatever you like, and can be easily configured by the user. You can write widgets in any ActiveScripting language you have installed, including the default VBScript, and JScript, as well as Python, Ruby…

Some examples of widgets that have already been created are: a Weather checker, a VWM, a System Info display, and more! Check it out!

• Kapsules
• ScreenShots

• Download Kapsules

Oh, one last thing you should know: this is a .NET application, and requires the Framework to be installed. [ ]

Login Image Modifier ( was lim.gussoh.com ) works on Windows 2000 Professional and Windows XP Professional/Home … and it’s freeware. It lets you easily change the image that is displayed in the login dialog (which of course, you only see in XP if you’re not using the fancy login screen) and the security screen you see when you press ALT+CTRL+DEL!

The cool thing about it is that you can replace it simple, you just get the LIM program and run it, then select three appropriately sized bitmaps and press “Save To Dll” for each one, “Update System” ... and the next time you reboot, it’s a done deal.

Of course, if you prefer the fancy login screen (it’s no shame, I do too) you probably already have the Logon UI Boot Randomizer from UserXP which lets you change not only your logon screen, but your boot up screen too. Maybe someone with more artistic talent than I would even like to put together a suite of skins for these various parts of our system based on the new GeoShell Logo artwork that I used as the basis for the screenshot you see here. [ ]

Edit Oct 25 2005]: For those who’ve been weeping because they couldn’t find a copy of this app anymore… I dug around and found… a mirror? it’s new homepage? a place where you can download it http://www.sohtell.se/lim/ (they even have my GeoShell skin in the gallery, so it must just be a mirror).