Updates
Sunday 26 March, 2006A small update to the main site has been made: there's now a news- and a download-section. Future updates will also appear at this place, so keep an eye on it.
AveDesk 2.0 is being worked on. Progress is going slow the last two months, mainly because
of us being busy with university and work. Plus, - as always - lots of ideas for AveDesk 2.0, but,
unfortunately, little time.
Some ideas for AveDesk 2.0 are rather interesting, especially from a users point-of-view, we think.
For example, there's a newly designed desklet-browser dialog for adding desklet to the desktop. The
old 'add a desklet'-dialog used a treeview for showing desklets: each desklet was a root-node and
if a desklet has skins, its node could be expanded to show the skins. This was a mistake! From a
programmers viewpoint it makes perfectly sense: the skins are just different appearances of a desklet,
so they are all linked to the desklet. However, it turned out most users didn't get this at all and
browsing the available desklets was a pain.
As you can see in the screenshot of the new dialog,
the treeview is gone and a simple flat, linear list is now used to display the available desklets;
desklets and their skins are all being treated as a 'desklet' now. For the user, this is a huge
improvement because he didn't see the difference between skin and desklet in the first place.
The biggest advantage, however, is that this dialog shows a preview icon of the desklet the user
is about to add. By simply looking at the preview icons, a user can quickly decide if its the
desklet he is looking for and if he is interested in it. If so, he can also directly read the
description of the desklet directly, rather than clicking the item first. So, the number of times
a user needs to click has been greatly reduced.
Because the list can quickly grow big -installing SysStats and AveScripter gives you 50 new items,
for example, a search-option is also available. Searching works the same way as in the popular media
organizer iTunes: the list of items is filtered with the search term, thus only items that match the
search term are visible. The searchbox is preloaded with all the available desklets names (not the
skins), so it's possible to use the searchbox as 'desklet'-selector, for people who prefer
the old method.
Adding Desklets to the desktop
In the new Desklet Browser, adding desklets to the desktop works much easier. Firstly, you can
double-click the item you want to add and the desklet will be added to the desktop with default
settings, on a default position. However, you also have the possibility to drag the preview icon
onto the desktop on the place you want. The preview icon will morph into a full-sized preview of the
desklet once you drag it outside the dialog's area (much like OSX's Dashboard). The advantage is that
you can directly see the dimensions of the desklet and place it where you want it. It's even possible
to directly set the window-level (called style in AveDesk) by dragging it onto Showcase, the desktop or another window.
Integrated On line Library
In the screenshot there's also a side-bar visible. The idea is that it's possible to add different
'feeds' that show new desklets from various internet sites. It's best illustrated with an example:
Suppose you could The SysStats Site and get an URL to a
new-sysstats-desklets-feed. Now, you enter this URL into AveDesk's Desklet Browser. A new
item will appear in the side-bar and when you click it, the listbox will load all SysStats desklets
that you haven't installed yet but are available on line. When you want to add a new SysStats desklet
to the desktop, you drag it onto the desktop and it will be automatically downloaded and installed
for you.
Instead of opening up the web-browser, finding the download package, downloading it, installing the
package and finally find the newly installed desklet in the Desklet Browser (5 steps so far) and
only then dragging the desklet to the desktop, the user is able to simply drag the
not-yet-installed desklet to the desktop directly, and thus saving 5 time consuming steps.
More to come next week!
The new Desklet Browser
