What's going on with my Zune XP Theme?

As I'd blogged about months ago, I've been in love with Microsoft's original Zune XP visual theme: it's dark, shiny, and requires no complicated hacking to get to install properly.

If you want to get it yourself, here's the direct link to the install file.

Now unfortunately, for some reason some elements of my Zune theme aren't displaying correctly. Specifically, it's instead displaying as the Windows classic view. Take a look:

Now if this was properly set up, the gray background for the "System Tasks", "Other Places" and "Details" should be the shiny orange look, and the background for that entire sidebar should be a darker gray.

I've reloaded my other themes and brought back the Zune theme, and it's still that way. I'm at a loss for what to do, and I'm afraid I'd end up changing things that would be a pain to change back if they don't work. Does anyone know what's going on here? If you do, you'll get your own featured article on Greasy PC!

Alt-Tab Replacement: Thumbnails with Alt-Tab!

OSX has some cool graphical tweaks that make it easier to navigate through the various open windows on your computer, but in my view, none of them are as functional and practical as the Windows taskbar. Now, with Alt-Tab Replacement, the other way of navigating your windows in XP, Alt-Tab, looks even cooler, and is even more functional!

As part of the awesome but why-didn't-they-come-in-the-install-CD package Powertools by Microsoft themselves, Alt-Tab Replacement enhances your Alt-Tab experience by adding thumbnails of your open windows! Observe:

Alt-Tab replacement runs as a process in the background called taskswitch.exe and shouldn't take more than 4 megabytes of RAM while running. It's so small and so fast (it renders the thumbnails error-free in the blink of an eye), that even though I've been super strict about my background processes, I've decided to keep this Powertoy (indeed!) I don't even use Alt-Tab all that often!

Plus it looks super coordinated with my Zune desktop theme.

Another Dock Review: JetToolBar (Verdict: No Thanks)

A comment on a recent post on MakeUseOf that talked about cleaning up one's desktop pointed me to JetToolBar, developed by COWON America, best known for making digital audio players. I haven't figured out yet how that and object docks/toolbars intersect, but I don't fault them.

From the official site, here's what JetToolBar offers:

Despite Microsoft's best intentions, the Start Menu isn't everybody's cup of tea. If you're looking for an alternative way to launch your programs, take a look at jetToolBar. During installation this well-done utility creates 14 default categories, registers shortcuts for many of your applications, and adds bookmarks for recommended Web pages.

jetToolBar is a simple and easy-to-use program launcher. When you install jetToolBar, it creates 14 default categories, registers shortcuts for your application programs, bookmarks of the best recommended Internet Homepages.

You can position the toolbar on any edge of the screen of any monitor in a docked state, or in a floating state as a normal window. In either state, you can change the size of the toolbar and the program launch buttons to various button sizes.

You can optionally show or hide the categories, and an auto-hide feature is included for optional use in the docked state. If you set hotkey, you can see "ToolBar Menu" anywhere of the screen with the hotkey.

Drag buttons to where you want them. Intuitive right-click menus let you easily access appearance and behavior options.

Category : Control Panel, Desktop, Multimedia, Word, Games, Graphics, Utility, Internet, Book Mark ( News, Sports, Entertainment, Computer News, Download, Search )

My thoughts? Well, the guy who led me to this commented that it was the only dock/toolbar he used after trying all the different ones. I tried it for about 10 minutes and realized that I and that other guy could not possibly have more differing tastes in what makes a good Taskbar alternative.

First of all, JetToolbar is skinned like it's for Windows 98. It is butt ugly, and the complete polar opposite of Object and RocketDock. It isn't compatible with Windows themes, so it did not match my Zune theme at all.

It does offer an always-on view of all your application shortcuts, and you can customize what goes on there, so if you're the kind of person that needs to have 30 different applications available to you at your fingertips, then I guess that's good for you. I prefer keeping my less-than-10 most-used applications in the Quick Launch bar (along with the Recycling Bin).

And finally, the clincher (though even if it had this feature I'd probably still think it was too ugly to use), it did not offer support for taskbar window access and the system tray. Clearly this toolbar isn't meant to replace the Windows taskbar, just supplement it... but what a waste of vertical space to have this thing around at all times. I could just increase the number of rows the task bar occupies and add more icons to the Quick Launch.

That being said, the product IS freeware and does just what it advertises, so I can't fault it too much, especially since it's developed by a company not really known for productivity software. For me, however, I'm still sticking to my good-old-taskbar.

What's gone

As I alluded to earlier, while that first month accounted for the most drastic changes to my desktop and parts beyond, some of the choices I made were inevitably overwritten. Here are some of the stuff that I ended up jettisoning after a week or more of usage:

• Windowblinds - A dark Windows theme is awesome, but it was a lot of work to integrate it with a lot of Windows applications, most of which were designed with a light theme in mind. The Windowblinds theme I was using, the gorgeous Eminence, for example, had incompatibilities with Macromedia Flash, in which the layer names were the same font color as their background (or just about), and made it difficult to go from one layer to another. I also didn't like how Windowblinds added yet another process in the background, which slowed things down even more.
  
  Luckily though, I discovered that Microsoft had released their own readymade themes for XP free for download: Royale, Royale Noir, and Zune, which was what I ultimately settled with. They all offered the shiny gloss of Vista but was a quick install that didn't involve an extra process. It basically just installs itself to show up like the other builtin XP themes like Classic and Silver (which was what I'd been using since getting XP 5 years ago)
  
  
• Google Desktop - as much as I loved the gadgets, Google Desktop just took too much ram, CPU, and hard drive space for its own good (almost all for the desktop search function, which I couldn't find any more handy than how I'd laid out my hard drive already... I also had some privacy issues with it). I momentarily tried Yahoo Widgets, which had less of a footprint, but I just came to realize that all those widgets weren't giving me much more functionality, and were really kinda cluttering up my desktop. Besides, widgets like To-Do Lists and Calendars I was able to integrate very nicely into Thunderbird using the Lightning extension.
  
  
• Proud of my new streamlined desktop, I treated myself to a really nice dual-display wallpaper. Then, becoming so enamored with looking at it, I sought out applications that could turn other apps translucent. You can see what my desktop looked like in November, a month after I started my quasi-project:
  
  It looked really cool like that for a couple of weeks, but in the end the app I used (whose name now escapes me... I tried a whole bunch of different ones) wouldn't work perfectly at startup, and really strained the 32 mb Rage 128 video card powering my 2nd monitor, (the 2nd display of my ATI radeon 9600 was reserved for my Wacom Cintiq). So after a while, that app went away also.

There are many other changes/upgrades/downgrades since back in November, but I plan on covering those in future editions dedicated to specific areas, like how I switched again from Trillian Pro to Miranda. Hope you come back to read them!

Taskbar versus Dock

A few months ago I asked a coworker who had recently become a Mac fanboy to try to convince me on using a Mac OSX-like Dock instead of using the Windows Taskbar, other than aesthetics. He said something about "application-based" versus "document-based," but it all sounded like he was quoting some blog article. So I checked some blogs, and got a better idea of what the hell he was talking about.

I decided to stick with the Taskbar (with the shiny Zune desktop theme, of course). It took up less desktop space and memory, and most importantly I hated how on the OSX dock, you couldn't see all of the open application windows accessible without cycling through them, or be minimized first. And there wasn't much of a difference from launching applications in the dock versus having them in the Windows quick start toolbar.

A few days ago, two months after that initial conversation, I decided to check out the two most popular options for a Windows dock myself: Objectdock (by Stardock, free or 20 dollars for the plus version), and Rocketdock (Punk Labs, freeware).

I tried Objectdock first, and was first impressed by its look (it looks a lot like the OSX dock, regardless of which of the included skins you used. Nothing wrong with that), and secondly at how small its memory footprint was. All of the options you had in the OSX dock were present (being able to drag/drop stuff into it, move them around, etc), plus quite a bit more (I do have to admit, the options windows weren't intuitively labeled, and I didn't have the easiest time with figuring out what the different options actually did.

It also docked vertically on the sides of the screen far better than any configuration of the windows taskbar.

I was pleased to learn that Objectdock also had the taskbar option of having all the windows represented on the right side of the dock (the same place OSX windows would go if you minimized them), and it worked just as I assumed. I was almost ready to throw out my Windows taskbar altogether. Except for one thing.

The free version of Objectdock did not have support for the system tray icons (the icons on the far right of the taskbar where the clock is). OSX doesn't have a system tray (at least not in the dock... I guess that thing on the upper right is its system tray), so I guess in trying to mimic OSX native support for that was unfortunately overlooked (despite the existence of taskbar support). Objectdock's premium version apparently does support the system tray, but apparently at the expense of taskbar functionality. I refused to pay a premium for something that can only do two of the three things I take for granted now at any given time.

Disappointed but not altogether surprised, I moved onto RocketDock, only to find it doesn't have any support for system tray icons at all (how can you dock people survive without it???)

I also tried other programs like Y'ZDock (I dunno where that name comes from), and checked out RK Launcher and Mobydock, and they all seemed to have the same limitations.

As such, I've decided to stick with my very tweaked, customized, shiny old taskbar:

Soon I'll highlight exactly what tweaks I did to make it look like that!

Mostly Crystal: My Firefox and Thunderbird Theme

I realized that I never plugged the Firefox and Thunderbird theme I use. It's one I've used since version 1.5 of both apps, when I first started using them, back in 2004. It's called Mostly Crystal by Cat Thief.

I like it because it adds the 3D glossiness that lets your buttons pop out above the toolbars. It's got a unified look, but isn't so uniform that you have a hard time telling what the icon does. Really it's basically the original Mozilla theme with a little more pop.

I'd looked for the longest time for a theme that worked well with the dark Zune Windows theme, but found that the dark browsers just didn't integrate well with most websites and most favicons just looked awful on the bookmarks toolbar. Mostly Crystal luckily looks great on both dark and bright Windows themes. To me, it's just the best, most useful Firefox and Thunderbird theme out there.

Here's a screenshot of Firefox and Thunderbird, both using the Mostly Crystal theme. One final thing to note is that it's also a great theme to use if you really want to strip down your apps of unnecessary buttons.

Better Alt-Tab Replacements Showdown Part 1 of 2: Taskswitch Pro

A month ago I featured the Windows XP powertoy Alt-Tab Replacement, which replaced the Alt-Tab display of just the row of icons and window names with icons, window names, PLUS thumbnail previews of the windows themselves.

A few days ago a commenter turned me on to Taskswitch XP, which he claimed did the same things Alt-Tab Replacement did, but much more. I wasn't in huge need of augmenting my Alt-Tab function even more, so I didn't jump at the chance of installing yet another program.




But now here we are. Taskswitch XP's own official site describes the program's features better than I can:

TaskSwitchXP is an advanced task management utility that picks up where the standard Windows Alt+Tab switcher leaves off. It provides the same functionality, and adds visual styles to the dialog and also enhances it by displaying thumbnail preview of the application that will be switched to.

TaskSwitchXP also has a powerful process and window management capability that allows you quickly to close/minimize applications and their groups. The unique capabilities of TaskSwitchXP make it useful for tracking down multitudinous windows, and provide insight into the way Windows and applications work.

TaskSwitchXP supports a few built-in interface schemes. It dynamically adapts to the selected Windows XP theme, provides customizable font and color settings for each user in the system. You can also choose preview and list styles, appearance effects, opacity of the switcher window and more. You can make your everyday environment to look whichever you want!

So how does it compare with Alt-Tab Replacement?

Pros: Taskswitch does exactly the same thing that Alt-Tab Replacement does, but much more. It has options for multiple themes, including matching whatever theme you currently use (as such, it worked as well as Alt-Tab Replacement at matching my Zune desktop theme).

You can even set it to be transparent, and can even smoothly fade in and fade out. I currently have it set to be slightly transparent and fade in and out in 100 ms (from the default 250, which took too long).

It also has options for customizing hotkeys, language, font and color, and size of the previewed window. In fact, it's basically overflowing with customizable features for a program whose function is so simple.

Finally, Taskswitch takes only 800 kilobytes of RAM in passive mode, and only takes 2 megabytes while actually holding ALT-Tab (I had to keep the Task Manager open first, and then hold ALT-Tab to see the RAM usage spike). This is better than Alt-Tab Replacement's 1.8 MB of RAM passively (I hadn't checked it while invoking the ALT-Tab feature, but it was certainly never enough to slow my computer down).

Cons: I definitely do not like Taskswitch running an icon in my system tray, where I only keep at most 6 icons running at all times. However, I understand that there wouldn't be an elegant way of accessing all the multitudes of features Taskswitch offers without this.

And so, I immediately set windows to always hide the Taskswitch system tray icon. Suddenly, Taskswitch stopped working! When I unhid the icon, it resumed functioning. But to make it perfectly clear, in my instance, Taskswitch will only work when the system tray icon is visible.

And honestly, Taskswitch's multitude of features is pretty overwhelming. Alt-Tab Replacement installed and just immediately worked. I use Alt-Tab for just a few seconds at most several times a week, it's not very much worth it to spend time customizing a program for longer than you'll use it.

Overall: Despite that last point, Taskswitch does work right out of the box, at least in a way that looked exactly like Alt-Tab Replacement. The extra features are available for those who care to tweak their settings (which you must be in a way, if you're reading this blog), but you don't need to bother if you don't want to. It's just icing on the cake that it uses less RAM than Alt-Tab Replacement.

However, the need for a persistent system tray icon is really annoying. An overcrowded system tray is one of my biggest pet peeves, so this is something I'll need to get a better feel for before I decide one way or another.

Now, come back tomorrow for a review of yet another Alt-Tab tool, and I'll compare it with Taskswitch, and we'll see what I end up using in the end.