“[DesktopX] has existed (at least in concept) since the mid-90s, when IBM was going to use OpenDoc to add similar features to OS/2 Warp 5. DesktopX 1.0 was released in 2000. Five years later, we have version 3.1 in our hands. DesktopX in its present state is more than a mere widget manager. While it does include a widget manager, it does a couple other things.”
Some months ago I played with various desktop enhanchers (or whatever they should be called) – Stardock Object Desktop (and other Stardock utilities), Kapsules, Samurize, Konfabulator, Rainmeter, EasyPod etc. Interesting and neat at first glance, finally most of these became boring and got uninstalled. Yes, it’s nice to know, how much free HDD space you have or does it raining currently – but all these little things just made my desktop cluttered.
There were two utilities, worth noting: Virtual Desktop Toolbox (free, but not open source), allowing create different desktops, using windows native multi-desktop support and/or having different shells; and Rainlendar (GPL), what is fully customizable on-screen calendar, including various notes, todo, appointments etc and it is able to sync with Outlook too. Well, I’m not using these, but some of my friends do
Back to topic – DesktopX is not complete desktop solution, it cannot replace Win Explorer. It can be interesting to play with, but I wouldn’t spend a dollar to buy it (yes, it’s commercial software, after all).
This is why Apple’s Dashboard has the one major killer feature nobody cottoned onto – Dashboard isn’t in your way 24/7. You press a key, it’s there, you let go, it’s gone. No messing about.
I use samurize, choose ‘pin to desktop’, ‘click through’ and it just becomes part of the desktop.
And… even that Dashboard is very cool (and usefull when you first think about it) you stop to use it after three weeks! After some time all these things just get boring! IMHO
DesktopX objects and widgets can be hidden with a single hot key press too.
I totally agree with this review. DesktopX tries to be a jack of all trades but ends up failing by doing nothing well. Widgets sometimes just randomly disappear, appear off screen, and lose their settings for no reason. The integrated widget builder sometimes crashes causing all your work to be deleted with no recovery. It seems like with each iteration of the program they add some funky new feature to try one up other programs like Konfabulator but do nothing to try improve the inherently buggy core. Not really worth spending money on in my opinion, there are programs like Konfabulator or Kapsules which while lacking in some features run much better and are free.
I’ve used Kapsules and if you think DesktopX is buggy then Kapsules is very problematic. Konfabulator is more stable as long as you run default widgets or ones that are derivative of it but if you stray off the reservation, you’ll find Konfabulator widgets are pretty flakey too.
I wonder how Microsoft’s “gadgets” will fare in all this.
Gnome and GDesklets works excellent, eyecandy, efficient and they don’t feel like wasting my system resouces at all unlike their ms windows counterparts