Two new apps that have something to do with tabs and are more or less skinnable. Nubs basically didges the taskbar and lets you position your tasks on all sides of the screen as tabs. On the internal front, QT TabBar adds a skinnable tab bar to Explorer.

“Nubs is an application for Windows similar to Sticky Windows (Mac OSX) developed by Andrew Powell, of Shellscape Software. Nubs is designed to maximize window management and organization with stylish and themeable tabs. It only takes a few seconds to learn, and is painless to use.

Nubs isn't just for fancy, tabbed Windows. Nubs does what the Windows taskbar can't — Nubs makes use of your entire screen. Multiple monitors? Not a problem for Nubs!”

I hope I got the operating principles right. Description's a bit vague and since this thing requires (surprise) the .NET framework, I can't test it mysef.

QT TabBar is a bit clearer. It just adds a toolbar with (skinnable) tabs.

“QT TabBar allows you to operates files and folders like tab browser folder grouping, histories, and etc.”

Then again, it too requires the .NET framework, so what do I know?

Credits for these finds go to sryo and vkeios. || craeonics | comments (9)

There have been a couple of developments in the realms of k23 productions. The most notable being the latest release of Cheekiemunkie/Full Phat's Snarl, a ‘fancy notification system for Windows’.

“Snarl is a notification system inspired by Growl for Macintosh that lets applications display nice alpha-blended messages on the screen. […]

The current version of Snarl under development includes seamless UTF8 unicode support for programming languages which support it natively. For other languages (Visual Basic 6 for example) which do not natively support Unicode, the api has been extended to provide support for these environments.

Additionally, Snarl now supports extensions - small code modules that run within Snarl's process space - which can be used to extend functionality of existing applications without requiring modifications to the application itself.

Extensions are already available for the following applications:

• MSN Messenger (notifies when people sign in)

• Microsoft Outlook (notifies when new mail is received)

• The Windows System Tray (translates the contents of balloon tips)”

Another development is that Snarl runs on top of the Melon toolkit, a ‘modular suite of libraries designed to take the effort out of developing content-rich, highly complex applications.’. When you install Snarl it first installs Melon (without asking where to put it, @#$%!!). Melon's info page has been up forever, but this is the first time I've actually seen it in action.

And now I finally know what that cryptic warning symbol, that's been plastered all over the site for some time now, stands for. It was a teaser for the upcoming (in the far and distant future) psychOS, a ‘a graphical desktop environment for Windows’. More on that when a build is out.

Kudos to spyder for the heads up. || craeonics | comments

So apparently bits and pieces of Mac Gadger's default skin have some relation with bits and pieces pogrelz' 3RVX default skin, going as far as having the same timestamp. Fishy, ain't it?

Said 3RVX, a skinnable volume controller, saw its version 1.0.4 release earlier this month. Unfortunately, the news post with changes rolled off the front page of its site before I could speak about it here. Truth be told, I had ample time to do so.

Whilst creating new skins for 3RVX, poggles' fires were sparked anew and after a day of coding, a new skinnable calculator rolled out of the labs of Malensek Enterprises.

“Yep. It's just a boring old calculator. A calculator that's fully skinnable with 32-bit PNGs. I have the OS X skin nearly pixel-perfect, though I still need to work on the font. Every image supports alpha transparency, so all kinds of cool skins will be possible with this app.

Most importantly, it supports… calculating! Awesome, eh? After about a day of coding, this thing is almost ready for release. I just need to work on the skins some more, map the keyboard buttons to the buttons in the program, and so a few other small fixes and it should be done for now.

If you'd be interested in skinning it, send me an email and I'll give you a beta version to try out. Skins aren't too hard to make, it's a pretty simple XML format. Really, the only hard part is drawing all those buttons. :p”

I suspect both apps require the freaking .NET framework. If you're cool with that and want to give the man a hand, give him a shout. || craeonics | comments (7)

As posted on customize, Mac Gadger is an app intended to emulate a number of Mac interface elements, namely volume and disk controls. It also uses the magic words ‘layered skin support’ and ‘32-bit PNG’.

“MAC Gadger is an application that emulates the look and feel of the Mac OS X volume bezel and CD/DVD Tray. It also provides a tray icon from which you can Change the Settings and When you Click on that it will show Volume Control that displays the current volume level and you can set the Volume from there in an OS X style controller.

Whats new in v2.0:

• You can now add this to Object Dock , Object Bar and other Applications (Look for 'MAcVol.exe' in installation folder').

• Skinnable with 32-bit PNGs , Layerred Skin Support Alpha , Transparency , Drop Shadows.

• Notification with Current System Volume display Load/Un-Load CD/DVD Door notification

• Hotkey support to Increase and Decrease and Mute volume, as well as Load/Unload CD/DVD Doors

• Supports Multiple Drives to Eject and Load

• New UI , with new Positioning System

• You can now Select your Custom Mixer

• User's Skin based Icon

• and lots of Bugs Patched and decrese the Usage of Memory”

Sounds like a lot of power for a mere volume controller. Then again, that's probably why it's a four meg download. || craeonics | comments (6)

Avant Window Navigator is a ‘fully customisable dock-like window navigator for Gnome’, or in other words, an icon based task bar. The author stresses that it may look like the OS X dock, but it does not try to imitate it. The main difference is probably that the OS X dock is a cross between an app launcher and a task bar, while this just does the latter.

“Avant Window Navgator (Awn) is a dock-like bar which sits at the bottom of the screen (in all its composited-goodness) tracking open windows.”

I'd label this app as ‘themeable’, seeing that the customisation boils down to seting the colours for the various elements and defining an optional backdrop pattern. || craeonics | comments

It seems to have mysteriously vanished from modern Mac keyboards (or I am overlooking things), but the old ones used to have a power down key. As a matter of fact, all PC keyboards I've bought had one.

Hence, I flick this key and Windows will shut down. I do no need to do anything like hit ‘Start’, ‘Shut down’ and another ‘Shut down’. Hell, I use a different shell, so I don't even have a Start button.

What's this all about? *gehrunnerjunge, a minimalistic(ally) skinnable shutdown tool.

“*gehrunnerjunge is a simple shutdown application that provides some customize options. It looks like the classic shutdown dialog, but doesn't require the fucking login dialog. It just has some basic features and will get more if my mood is right.”

You can find more screenshots at DevArt.

Skinnability is really minimal. Just a background image and some colour settings for the menu. Titlebar and buttons are dependent on the visual style you use. || craeonics | comments

If you have Vista, you may have noticed that the tray balloons look the same like they did in XP. Curious enough, this wasn't the case in the betas, where they had a glassy effect. AndreasV, author of AveDesk, was peeved enough to write a little app to change this, Glass Toast.

“What's working?

• intercept notification balloons and replace them with a glass toast (longhorn 4xxx style)

• notifications give the same response as real balloons (eg. "click here balloons" initiates the same acation with glass toasts)

• made stuff a bit prettier.

What's stupid?

• all offset values are hardcoded. All others are derived from bitmap sizes.

• stupid DWM blurring: mask.bmp is used for masking out the blur on parts that should be 100% transparent; white = invisible; black=visible in the mask.bmp

• occasionally some problems (seems not all applications use the correct flags)”

And you might have guessed it, this app will only work on Vista. || craeonics | comments (3)