All good points, Scott. Agree on the widgets. Agree on the tutorial. And I'm with you on the new editor; there are more options for plugins and objects, but the interface is a step back from 1.65. It's a royal pain to use. There's basic functionality missing.

One thing that really bugged me was when I was recently trying to switch the position of my bar from vertical to horizontal. I have a sidebar, and wanted to try it across the top. I seem to remember that you could do this in 1.65, but you sure can't do it now. After realizing I would have to recreate all my individual menus and icons in the new bar(since you can't copy them from theme to theme or bar to bar), I gave up.

I dunno. OB is still my most indispensable GUI app because of the way it lets me replace the XP start menu. The abilities to have custom menus and virtual folders alone are worth their weight in gold. I could never go back to say, trying to find Ipconfig, or Group Policy, or System Properties in one of the million scattered places MS saw fit to put them, when I can have a Settings menu with all my system settings in one place.

Growing up on Macs, that is the single thing that bothers me the most about Microsoft GUI design; they give you four different ways to do one thing, none of them intuitive, or they scatter common tasks all across the universe. I don't want to do registry hacks or tweak the start menu anymore. I shouldn't have to do that. I just want to drop my OB theme onto a new install, and remap the shortcuts.

In the end, I have to think it's just a cost / benefit thing. The application works for what it does, it just isn't particularly refined. And if you're Stardock, why keep developing OB if three people use it? My gut tells me that most people who use the OD suite don't do it to change the functionality of their OS. They just want to make their desktop look pretty. And OB is all about the former.

To the original poster: I can put up my theme if you want me to. I have one thread in here: it's screenshotted in there. I run another version now with the spaces taken out... it looks like the Mac dock as a sidebar. The thing that has stopped me is, I'm not a skinner or a programmer... I'm just a user. The theme uses a skin I ripped from a WB theme, and icons from everywhere. It isn't "new" work except in the sense that I designed the menus and layout.

Anyhow. Bigger problems there are, surely.

Also, if you look at the tutorial that Frogboy pointed a link to on wincustomize, its really really complex

I missed that could you direct me to it.

I wouldn't expect many new themes to be posted. Why bother?

I have a few ideas I've been playing with and may eventually post. The problem is most links are machine specific so you end up restricting yourself to creating menus to add links to. For myself, I use a modification of the Accessorize theme having added a bottom bar (taskbar on steroids) and figured out how to keep it from changing with each Windowblinds change. I couldn't upload it cause it's based on Mike Brandt's Reduce theme. I've just been waiting to get my hands on some documentation to follow all the different directories as well as line items in the obbar files.

Thanks Zubaz

You know . . I wish the internets supported images   

WWW Link

And then there's this (from the above link):

The trouble most people have with ObjectBar skinning, beyond the lack of good learning samples, is the dissociation between the skin building in the bar building. Its tricky because you can't just start ObjectBar, add something and set its look...its not possible to just in the program create a grouping and then say "ok, for this grouping use this background bitmap and these margins" without doing that work up front. You first have to create a skin that lists the images and margins etc, and then apply it to the bar. This all requires a degree of planning most aren’t willing to do, as you have to have to figure out on paper really what you want your bar to be, design a skin around it with the necessary group-styles, then build the bar and apply the skin to it.

Why?

For the record, the OB, OD dev, Jeff Bargmann is a great guy and another of the SD employees that I consider a friend. I think any faults in the lack if OB world-domination is due to other pressures.

Whoops, posted the above on the random account I made when unable to log in. How I wish the forum would take my logins consistently.

There are now TWO (count them yourself, TWO!!) OB themes in the OB library.   

My contribution: ZubazNormalv2

Rockin'!! Way to go, Zubaz!

for some reason it initially opened with rightclick even when it was showing OB as the default


reopened with OB = all is good

way to go Z

Well, screw it. Maybe I'll post mine. But if it uses tons of icons that I can't remember the sources of, how should I handle that? I don't want to take credit for anyone's work.