[release] Avedesk 1.1

[AndreasV]

AveDesk 1.1

desktop enhancer +

AveDesk 1.1 is the successor of AveDesk 1.0 which was launched in January 2004. After 6 months of hard work, a new version of AveDesk was born. Keeping the feel of the application the same, much has been improved.

Graphical Improvements

Dropshadows are now looking better than ever. Real time created shadows of your icons is available to you with a wide range of options to set for the actual dropshadow. With one click, you easily give your favourite desklets a pretty dropshadow.

Colorizing is a totally new feature. Where AveDesk 1.0 only had an option to grayscale a desklet, AveDesk 1.1 offers to modify both the saturation and the hue of any desklet. You can quickly make all your icons match one color-scheme.

Desklets can and will easily do nice animations. For example, when you are preparing to drop a bunch of files on a folder desklet, the folder will morph from an closed folder icon into an opened one, indicating to the user that the files can be dropped onto the desklet.

Another addition is that hidden labels will fade in and out on mouse over, making it more pleasant to look at.

With a good looking dropshadow under your icon, the labels text couldn't stay at the old shadow: Labels now have highly tweakable dropshadows, which will give numerous possibilities for the label to look.

Another option is to make the label be in 'Top Down'-style, which is handy for Asian characters.

from left to right: icon with dropshadow, icon with glow, icon with colourization.

Better Functionality

AveDesk 1.1 will come with a default set of highly usuable desklets: For every type of shortcut, there is a special, optimized desklet. There is a regular , a folder and a drive -shortcut. Each type of shortcut will show different information and act differently. The regular shorcut can show a preview of image files it points to for example, while a drive shortcut has the possibility to be hidden when the drive is not mounted.

The notes desklet is another nifty widget that comes with AveDesk 1.1. It will allow you to quickly make little notes all over your desktop. Simply drop text on it and drag it into a document to quickly access the notes texts. If there is more text on the note than can be showed, the text will automatically scroll when you hoover the mousecursor over it.

To make it look like a real stickie - you know, those you put on your fridge-, there are a lot of options available like rotate text or a bounding rectangle for the text.

Besides those 4 handy desklets, AveDesk 1.1 will feature enough other desklets to have fun with, to make your desktop look pretty and to boost your productivity.

All desklets are interact better with each other too. With the addition of full drag-'n-drop ( desklets can accept all kinds of drops and are able to be dragged), removing a certain desklet is just as simple as dragging it to a Trash desklet and dropping it: voilá, it's gone.

More Information

While the regular labels also give a lot of information, AveDesk 1.1 has seperated the available information. Besides the interactive icon of each desklet, every label will now be seperated into two parts: The caption and a sublabel.

While the caption can totally be defined by the user, the sublabel will show extra information under the caption. A drive desklet will show the amount of free space left on the particular drive and a shortcut desklet will show additional information about the file it points to.

This additional information in the sublabel is configurable by the user or can simply turned off with one click.

Effects

Something totally new to the concept of AveDesk is the effect. Effects do cool things to your desktop. The Shake Effect will make your desklets shake on mouseover, the glow effect will give your icons a nice pulsing glow. The possibilities are endless.

Effects can easily be added to AveDesk. A simple scripted file is enough to act as a powerfull effect.

Matrix Effect by Kerin.

Better User Interface

The tabbed user interface is ofcourse still there, but the tabs are reorganized to provide a more cleaner look and to make working with the interface easier: Colors can easily be set through the use of dropdown-color buttons.

Everytime an icon can be changed with a button, the user can also easily drop the icon/PNG file onto the preview pane.

And on popular request: the tray icon can now be changed or removed in the options settings.

Under The Hood

The best changes are under the hood though. The core of AveDesk is still the same, but has been extended a lot.

A new C style API is present with a whole new way of handling images: Each desklet exists of several layers, where every layer will have its own rotation, alpha level, hue, saturation and more. All the programmer has to do is to set the properties for a layer and AveDesk 1.1 will make sure the desklet is rendered.

Drag-'n-drop has been fully implemented to both ways. The desklets programmer gets an easy way to implement drag-'n-drop for its desklet. AveDesk 1.1 will handle all the d&d and gives a more friendly version to the desklet.

AveDesk 1.1 now offers a more Windows compliant way of handling propertypages.

Kudos and thanks

- Mikegraphik for being the gfx-teammember

- Herd, aka mr. COM. The whole COM implementation was done by herd! Big kudos to you Sir!

- Judge, for numerous hints, snippets and ofcourse SysStats 2.0

CoLLumBus for maintaining the supportDesk :(

- Unbeliever for the moral support thru chat

- All beta-testers for their valuable reports, bug noticing, hints

- Ji Eun for having his KDX server :naughty:

- All people who donated some $$$ to me, because it really helped me spend more time on this.

- Al, for being Alilm

HINTS

-To drag a desklet rather than to move it, first hold SHIFT.

-Set the shadows alpha to something like 800 to make it bigger.

-AveDesk can be accessed thru VBScripts, I will release some more info on this pretty soon, along with the AveDesk SDK.

Other

Releases will follow a bit quicker now, starting with a 1.1 on icon-steroids.

You can simply update your old version, by first backing up your theme.ini. This release includes a sample theme.ini.

Also, a desktop plugin that will convert your desktop icons into desklets at real-time, will come pretty soon.

Notes

THANK YOU BUTTON

Download

Installer: http://mpj.tomaatnet.nl/AveDesk11.exe (thanks to theunknown )

ZIP files:

http://www.avedesk.com/AveDesk11.zip

http://mpj.tomaatnet.nl/AveDesk11.zip

http://seph.ws/ave/AveDesk11.zip

[carbonfiber]

:woot: :woot: :woot: :woot: YAY AVE YAY

REALLY AWSOME WORK Like a WHORE

really great, thanks a lot, really great

[Unbeliever]

i told u it would rule

[mubach]

Breathtaking, I am speachless. Thank you so much for including the secondary label.

[ntchemist938]

Dude... You are the greatest

[Hyral]

HOLY SHT!!!!!

This is amazing!

WOOOOOOOO HOOOOOOOO!

[bh2]

Crikey me old skip... :woot: can we just say :woot:? Yay...we can!

[Hybrid Rainbow]

IT ROCKS!!!! thnx for including the labels man

[Arcanthur]

Absolutely amazing.

The ftp drop is great and the speed of the app is much better.

Thank you Ave :cry:

[deathmedic3rd]

/me gives ave a big hug

thanks man... works great... and im loving this all over again

[Tricky]

Andreas - you deserve a big shiney gold medal for this release....

The amount of time and effort that you must have put into this app clearly shows.

(Y)

[wankey]

This thing is probably going to soon banned by Apple because it's so good.

*Knock on wood*

[AndreasV]

This thing is probably going to soon banned by Apple because it's so good.

Why, it's not an Apple-software clone?

[babypapichulo]

Who's the best desktop enhancment coder????

AVE

OMFG!!!!!

14 People all over this!

EDIT: 16 people....and more to come.

[deadzombie]

This is what DesktopX should have been. Thank God someone finally got Desktop Gadgets right.

Notes Desklet is amazingly customizable., with rotating text, drop shadows and notes up to basically any size. For those of you that want the Marker felt tip font, you can get it here:

Marker Felt Tip Font

The FTP desklets are amazing. Drag and drop FTP saves me tons of time everyday uploading files to my server for my clients. This one desklet alone maked the entire app worthy.

Avedesk 1.1 does work with Systats! I've been running different Systats plugins for the past few weeks through beta, and AndreasV fixed every conflict I encountered.

AndreasV: Speaking of Beta testing, the two minor issues I last reported are the only two issues I've found. Avedesk works perfectly on dual desktops, remembering it's positions perfectly. FTP desklet can handle over 600 files @ 10 Gb at one go, probably more, so it's running fine. All the effects seem to be copasetic, as does large image handling. And last but not least, Avedesk remembers at least 20 notes desklets (I stopped testing after that!)

All in all, this app KICKS MAJOR ASS. Thanks AndreasV, you rule.

[kidrocky7]

wow, f***en awesome! congrats

[Hobbes]

YOOOOOOOOPPPPPIEEEEEEEE !!!!

Can you make the stickies look like the ones in TIger ?

[Duckie]

Originally posted by ifido@Jul 24 2004, 05:07 PM

YOOOOOOOOPPPPPIEEEEEEEE !!!!

Can you make the stickies look like the ones in TIger ?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

That's easy...download the stickies png's in the other thread (app skins) then change the sticky desklet to 256x256...done

[Unbeliever]

throwing in a pintless post - 29 pple in this thread! :woot:

i doubt a thread titled "nude pics of Tim & Stevie making out" would cause more interest than this

[liquidplasmaflow]

//Puts Ave at the top of "Favorite Coder" list, moves Siwu down a notch

:woot:

[-=maoos=-]

:woot: :woot: :woot: :woot:

Man, you are great !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[pcdit]

What more can you say beggar's beleif really.

Rude picture removed, please don't post pictures that show disrespect to the Samurize crew. - Ave

[Max2Go]

Beautiful work! Thx fot the new evolution of this app!!

[AndreasV]

Here's a little example of how AveDesk can be accessed thru VBScript (thanks to the godly COM powers of herd ): http://mpj.tomaatnet.nl/Dashboard.vbs .

Oh, and I also implemented the THANK YOU BUTTON in advance :naughty:

I heard somewhere that the good Alilm will make an app out of this that, so it will be like the Dashboard effect in Tiger, so use his thank you button too .

[castroman]

Great work Andreas !

thanks a lot !

/aviel