Objectdock Skins
Flaviana Bresee
Well as a skinner looking for the best and awesome I have been trolling the monthly screenshots post today and I found taht some of the submissions are using rainmetere. I was wondering if you guys have used rainmeter and how easy it is to customize and configure. I have tried it before but it is nothing like desktopX and I love desktopX. DesktopX is easier to create edit and move things around as things can be grouped. I have tried moving and configuring things with rain meter and it is just unbelievable hard to do. Not to mention you have to learn their convention for coding and customizing. I find it very confusing.
As part of the Rainmeter team I use it all the time. There is a little bit of a learning curve, but it's not really that hard. Yes grouping is something that is missing and I would very much like to see myself, unfortunately for now our developers are a limited resources and the grouping is not yet a priority. Hopefully we will get it some day. As far as learning Rainmeter here are some helpful links, and don't forget the included help file.
Yes, rainmeter is very in depth and there are a lot of options. However, I usually just edit skins that others have already made. It's easier this way, and it's also a way of slowly learning the code. Rainmeter is just great, the possibilities are endless.
I have found objectdock to be fairly easy to skin. Everything is pretty self explanatory, and it all comes down to trial and error. Once you get a feel for how the borders should be set up, it's easy from there. The original objectdock skins have explanations of code in the config files, so you can quickly catch on.
I'm not a skinner, but I use Rainmeter all the time and find it quite easy to customize skins to my liking. But I have not created my own. Alot of people use Rainmeter and ObjectDock or DX at the same time.
As Dragonmage mentioned, you should take a look at the tutorials and cruise through the forum. Over at deviantArt, we have a Rainmeter Group where you can find skins, ideas from screenshots, addons, etc...
Yes Karmat I am in the Rainmeter group for some inspiration and I have tried Rainmeter but there are some limitations I am not to happy with and the learning curve for me is very rough as I need someone to help me learn it as I go. SOrry thats how I learn (stupid ADHD). Anyway I dont' feel as though I have the support system to help me learn it as I have been to their IRC channel and they practically kicked me out cause I was having so much trouble.
As a person who has accumulated many skins over the years while using WindowBlinds 10, it became necessary for me to place all of my WindowBlinds skins on a separate drive from the drive WindowBlinds was installed to. I was able to do this thanks to RedneckDude listing for me all of the registry changes I needed to make in order for everything to work smoothly. I am very grateful to him, because he went the extra mile for me.
Now that WindowBlinds 11 is officially released, I've installed it. I had upgraded to Windows 11 a few months ago and knew beforehand that WindowBlinds 10 was incompatible, so I uninstalled it knowing that WindowBlinds 11 would be released imminently.
What I don't want to assume is that the directions for registry changes that RedneckDude gave me would automatically work with the new install of WindowBlinds 11. I don't want to break the program and make a mess of things on my end.
What I am hoping is that someone might explain to me how to direct the WindowBlinds 11 program to my other drive so it can populate the program with all of my skins. I don't know if there is a new method to do this, or if it's still a matter of making registry changes.
I assume you are running Windows 11 on an SSD disk, so the large number of files will not slow down your system. How large is your Stardock skins folder? Mine is around 12 Gb with Windowblinds, IP & CursorFX.
Mine is 14.9 Gbs. I have the room on my C drive, but I suppose I'm just paranoid about losing too much space. From looking at the folder, I feel I could comfortably place the skins on my C drive where WindowBlinds is installed.
I guess I was too paranoid because I knew it was a pretty hefty amount of data. That's why I install most of my programs and games to other large SSD's in my system. I figure if I didn't have that policy for programs in general, I would have run out of room on my C drive long ago.
Still, it's a habit I developed a long time ago. I need to not automatically just go with my model of installing most other programs and data files for programs that do reside on the C drive to other drives. I need to be able to make a reasoned decision after examining the truth of the evidence when it comes to overall size of the data. In some instances, it's valid for data to go on other drives. In this case though, thanks to you, I've decided it does not.
I do think this brings up a possible thing to consider though. Most programs upon installing them give the user the ability to choose which drive they wish to install to. During the installation, the dialog box came up showing where the program was going to be installed, but it did not give the user the choice to install it somewhere else. I think it's a fair point to put forth that that freedom during the installation process should be given to the end user since so many other programs give the end user that ability.
This new version has really impressed me. The settings are easy to navigate it took me 5 minutes to customise the dock to my liking, the live icon reflections have saved me hours of downloading and editing, and having the OSX(ish) background bundled with it has really saved me a lot of work. Not to mention it has the best support for Windows 7 than any other dock in this list.
Nexus dock worked perfectly with my system I had no performance issues with it at all, and it also had the live icon reflections and bundled backgrounds. It also came with some fairly good docklets. It is a powerful dock and should not be taken lightly.
Ok so the bad about this dock is that the settings are hard to navigate especially if you have never used a dock before. Also the load on the system at times can be heavy so its something you might want to avoid if you are using a netbook or slow computer.
XWindows Dock is a great alternate for those who are new to using docks on Windows. It has live icon reflections and easy ways to import skins and docklets, it also has great quality icons with live icon reflections. The graphics engine it uses is also very light on the system. The settings are easy to navigate.
However, it does not support minimising Windows to the dock, it does not have a reserve edge of screen feature. It also has not been updated in quite some time. So whether this project has been abandoned remains to be seen.
I am going to say all these docks have their good and bad points, personally I like using either ObjectDock or Nexus Dock. If you have any docks you would like to share please feel free to leave them in the comments.
As you will have gathered from the screen shot above, ObjectDock includes new Bundled backgrounds, one of which being an OSX background, which again is awesome as it saves searching, downloading and the messing around to get it working. You can also download more from WinCustomise if you wanted more backgrounds.
Overall StarDock have made very welcomed improvements to the dock. The live icon reflections work really well and the icon quality is amazing. However with new improvements there are new problems. Once such problem is that the dock when using the zoom effect it seems to slow the whole system down, and when minimising Windows to the Dock the minimise animation is slow and very laggy and impacts the performance of the whole system.
Again StarDock have kept good features for paid customers, honestly if your looking for most of the paid features for free then I recommend you get Nexus Dock. Its still stupid how they expect you to pay for this.
It's been a while, but we're finally returning to the days of blasphemous Windows customization. Stardock just revived ObjectDock, a popular tool that replaces the Windows taskbar with a macOS-like dock. You can now use ObjectDock in Windows 11 or 64-bit Windows 10 installations. So, go crazy.
ObjectDock initially launched in 2003 and has supported nearly every version of the Windows operating system. It's one of several products in Stardock's stable, but it was practically abandoned after a 2.20 update in 2015. The newest iteration of ObjectDock, version 3.0, has been seriously overhauled for Windows 11 compatibility, though it retains most of the design elements and features that users treasured in the past.
You can also create custom skins for ObjectDock, or simply choose from the collection of preset skins. Some users may be tempted to install community-made skins, but I'd wait a few weeks, as old skins from the 2.20 release may need to be updated for Windows 11.
The only notable change, aside from Windows 11 support, is that ObjectDock is now included with the Object Desktop suite. Those with an annual subscription to Object Desktop can install ObjectDock at no additional charge.
On its own, ObjectDock costs $9.99 for new users or $3.99 for those upgrading from a previous release. The ObjectDock license is perpetual, meaning that it's a one-time charge. If you want a full suite of Windows customization tools, you can opt for Object Desktop, which costs $49 annually (with $10 off your first year). Stardock isn't offering a free version of ObjectDock 3.0, though you can install a free trial.
Quoting Zanzahar, reply 7I'm experiencing some problems with Deskscapes. Running Deskscapes on Windows XP Service Pack 2.
1) I could only use dynamic dreams. Using non-dynamic dreams results in the dream opened in a new window instead of in the background and it only runs a couple of seconds before it crashes (probably at the loop point) and a message about incompatible codec appears.
2) When I use dynamic dreams, almost all of my objects on the desktop blinks rapidly. This includes ObjectDock, Rainlendar, Windows Sidebar (I'm using Vista Sidebar on XP) and CursorXP. The blinking problem does not occur if I use XP default theme, Luna for Windowblinds, default cursor (no CursorXP) but I still need to turn off ObjectDock and Rainlendar.