On WinCustomize we find word of a new version of the skinnable app launcher/start menu replacement, NextStart. This release primarily fixes a couple of bugs that slipped through in 3.40.

“NextSTART Version 3.41 fixes a few bugs that went undetected with version 3.40:

• It was no longer possible to re-arrange menu items even if pressing the SHIFT key, the item was always copied.

• Menus that turned Inactive by becoming semi-transparent could momentarily be displayed as a black rectangle while the new sub-menu opened (the larger the sub-menu, the longer the parent menu remained black). Now you should, at the most, get a flicker lasting a fraction of a second.

• Z-Order (Always On Top) problems: the Startbar/Tasklist and Hotspot buttons could under certain conditions lose their Always On Top status.

• If you chose not to display the Systray, NextSTART would show a gray bar at the top of the screen on startup.”

NextStart is shareware, $24.95 and weighs in at 4.3 megs. It comes as an installer with documentation and themes. || craeonics | comments

Short story: redllar's fungusTabs lets you group apps together into tabs that appear on the side of the active window of a tab group. It's pretty damn cool. It's pretty damn configurable. And it's also pretty damn alpha. So try it and report the inevitable bugs to the master coder himself.

Long story: there's something fundamentally flawed in the way we work with computers. While the window metaphor enabled us to switch from single task to multi task, we aren't truly multitasking yet. Yes, you can have multiple windows on your screen simultaneously, yet things clutter up immensely. To make things worse, there is no way to organise different processes you have going.

I don't know about you, but I do multiple things at a time. I'm doing graphics, sorting files, reading emails. All diverse tasks that require a set of programs. And I'm really not waiting for the programs belonging to one task to mix up with those of another task.

In short, my desktop is a bloody mess.

The solution is to somehow group the apps you need. To stick them together. Most software developers follow the unholy path of the monolithical app to end all apps, which sucks up your entire screen and most of the time, your disk space as well.

Others let you arrange the apps you need onto different desktops. The multiple desktop approach works quite well, but you tend to lose focus of what's running where and what not.

The ultimate solutions, if you ask me, is what fluxBox does on *nix. It allows you to group apps together as tabs which appear on the border of the active window of said group.

Last time I was bitching about this, some moons ago, redllar dropped in and told me he had been working on such a system. And as you can see from the screenshot above, it works. It works quite well even.

Now the app in question, fungusTabs, is still in alpha. This particular build (20060120-001) seems to have some issues with dragging in general. But there's where you come in. In order to rid this app of the bugs that invest it, we need to find them.

Get this little gem, you know you'll like it, and when you run into something of which you say, “hey, what the…” shoot off an email to redllar describing what you did, what you were expecting and what went wrong. fungusTabs can only get better by it. || craeonics | comments (3)

SkinBase is holding a winter competition. Upload a skin before the fifth of February and you might be the lucky winner. Prizes are ho hum, but it's more the thought that matters anyway.

“Upload any winter themed work from 18 Jan - 5 Feb and participate in our Winter Competition. Winter themed works are: skins, wallpapers, photos etc with subject a heavy winter. The rules are simple, just submit your hard work(s) with a winter subject , please dont send Christmas themes, Christmas competition will follow in December.

The prizes for the winners are:

• 1st prize: 1 year free webhosting (100mb quota, ftp access, own domain or skintech.org subdomain, php)

• 2nd prize: 30$ gift certificate on Amazon.com (You can buy anything you want from amazon.com)

• 3rd prize: email account at skinbase.org

The winners will be announced at the 6th of Feb, 2006”

February 5th is two weeks from now. That's rather swift, so I hope enough people are fast enough to whip something up before that deadline. You can find the entries to this contest in the special Winter Competition section. || craeonics | comments

…to have deep conversations and long walks on the beach with. But seriously now, CutTheRedWire has taken it upon himself to investigate into the unfortunate demise of popular skinnable apps of yore and mold the result into a Tek article.

And he needs your help with that.

“I'm writing an article for Tek. It's about dead skinnable apps and why they die. It's sort of an investigative report. When possible, I'm going to contact the author/coder to see what happened or why they lost interest.

The thing is that over the years, a lot of apps have died. I can't fit them all in one article, so I'm taking requests. That's where you guys come in. If you use or used to use an app that is dead, just tell me the name and whatever you know about it.

For those curious, skinnables lists the status of all the apps it lists. The site is basically one big software list. It also has a sort of museum of apps in its archive.

So far these are the apps I'm deffinately including. I know most the story on these, and am confident I can get in touch with the authors.

• Sonique (by Originally MediaScience)

• K-Jöfol by a guy who got hired by nullsoft

• MyPad by Base2

• Greybook by jier of 545 Studios

• QuickNotes by (lowspirit was it?)

Original discusion here.”

I think it's a great idea, but that might have something to do with my involvement with a certain ezine and the fact that I know all those programs. We shouldn't needlessly dwell on the past, but that doesn't mean we should forget what has transpired or what once was.

So if you have any suggestions on apps (or devs) to investigate, give the man a shout in his thread on Skinnables. || craeonics | comments (2)

Art'n'Skins, your daily overdose of emoticons, erm, I mean, A place where people of all ages can display their artwork, share, help each other, learn, and make friends, have had their domain hijacked. It used to be artnskins.com, but some bastard nicked that and turned it into spider bait. Now they can be found at artnskins.net.

“I can not believe to what has happen. The domain Artnskins.com (.com ext) is no longer available to Art n Skins site. The .com has been hijacked, how I have no idea , guess I should have locked it or something. (which I did now)

The good news we still have the artnskins domain but with a new ext ending .net [...] For those of you who have Art n Skins bookmarked or linked please update them!”

Quite a weird situation. Some digging reveals that both the .com and the .net domain were registered through GoDaddy. So perhaps they made an error there.

It's probably of little consolation, but I do prefer .net over .com. .net as in ‘network’ against the cold and heartless ‘commercial’. Then again, you could say that .com stands for ‘community’. || craeonics | comments (3)

GO is freeware, minimalistic shell replacement that has recently become skinnable. If you want something that uses almost no resources, or like trying out different shells, it's worth checking out.

GO is designed to be as simple as possible. It just opens programs and can shutdown/restart your computer. No taskbar, tray, clock, or start menu replicas. It does have 38 hotkeys, a place to type in commands, and button for you favorite app (I recommend shortpopup). This is probably too simple for an average user, but it does the job nonetheless.

The trade off is that the shell uses almost no resources and is set to idle cpu usage. A nice feature for older computers, power hungry gamers, or ppl who recently lost memory to spontaneous RAM combustion.

Fittingly, skinning GO is as simple as anything else in the app. It is just a single bitmap. The program knows where the regions are. It isn't freeform skinnable, but that is a tradeoff for simplicity.

Special thanks to ShellCity for hosting the app and recently posting news on it. || cuttheredwire | comments (4)