DesktopX goes public
By: Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco
Posted: 18/10/2000 at 07:31 GMT
DesktopX - half of Stardock's attempt to recreate Microsoft's lost Cairo
project - was publically unveiled today in alpha form for widespread
download.
Ever it since it was burned by the failure of the Bob project, Microsoft has
been cautious about throwing new UI paradigms at the great unwashed.
DesktopX not only does this - with a vengeance - but smuggles in the first
end-user scriptable object framework we've seen since OpenDoc. It's very
gracefully subversive, and has the potential to do for Windows what
Hypercard did for the Mac in the eighties.
What's slightly surprising since we last looked is the quantity of useful objects
that are available. DesktopX objects don't just look purty, there's one that
controls WinAmp, another that's a visual biff for checking your mail, and
another that's a replacement drive icon that shows free disk space as a pie
chart.
Most of this has been achieved without programming - all the user has to do to
create their own is to call up a template and start filling in the blanks from
dialog boxes. A browser is not far behind, says Stardock CEO Brad Wardell.
"That should be possible in a few hundred lines of code," he claims. It's still
early days and the objects haven't really begun to interact with each other.
So what doesn't it do? Well it doesn't fix any of Windows' underlying
problems - terrible hardware latencies for multimedia, registry bloat, security
... we suspect you know these pretty well. But that would hardly be fair, as it
doesn't claim to. It isn't cross platform either, and there are no plans to
implement it on non-Windows operating systems.
However it's a idea bigger than any one platform, and extremely well
implemented, and so Stardock could benefit from tolerating the kind of
benevolent reverse engineering that AOL and Napster demonstrated with
ICQ and Napster the client.
Of the many impressive ideas floating around Linux GUI land, none makes the
break with the Mac/Windows metaphor, although as a development exercise,
writing cross-platform DesktopX objects would be far from trivial.
A few rough edges remain too, and on release could benefit from some
wizards, and very clear "what do I do now?" signposts. Corporates will almost
certainly want the ability to turn disable many of the add/modify object
functionality - they're too damn easy to get to (which of course, is the point).
As we noted when we first heard of the project, it could prove to have a
major strategic influence on future Windows, as OEMs have been dying to
take the "user experience" into their own hands for some time, and one of the
proposed DOJ remedies put limits on Microsoft being able to prevent this. But
as the Microsoft trial heads for the appelate court, with every prospect of a
mini trial rerun stretching well into next year, that day won't come anytime
soon.
It's version 0.50, although Stardock.net subscribers have been treated to early
previews. Windows 2000 users get a revamped task list, and alpha-blended
objects. Wardell doesn't expect a release before the end of Q2 next year.
Stardock plans to rewrite configuration files in XML, so if the Windows
goalposts move, it'll be easier to move DesktopX with them.
theregister.co.uk |
