Creating an ObjectBar

Introduction

Installing and running

Starting a new bar

OB Elements

Adding, removing, Split group, Merge up, Hide group

Element Breakdown

Link (Shortcut or URL)
Folder Menu (e.g. Programs)
Popup Menu
Various Function Item
Clock
Taskbar (and a little more Various Function Item)
MFU List (Most Frequently used)
Folder:
System Tray
Virtual Desktops
DesktopX Widget
Plugin
Separators
RSS Feed
Address bar:
Mail checker:
Meters
DesktopX Widget (Cont.)

Cool features:

Tear offs
Autohide; Dock/Undock; Always on top, Task Manager, Theme Editor
Using other skins

Saving and Exporting

General options

My Favorite embedded DX Widgets

Introduction

ObjectBar is one of my favorite applications in the Object Desktop suite.  It has all the power of DesktopX, Virtual Desktops, RightClick, ControlCenter combined plus it can use any Windowblinds skins you have.  It allows me to create menus or bars that are customized to me.  I can make power menus or Vista-like docks.  I can embed external objects to supplement functions that are not natively there.

Installing and running

I install all my Stardock applications through Stardock Central.  It allows me to install, keep current, archive, restore, and uninstall all my Stardock apps.  Nice.  You can run ObjectBar from there or, after installing, it will be available in your Windows Start menu (usually) under "All Programs | Object Desktop.  So open it up!

Starting a new bar

The start of every bar is starting the bar.  It couldn't be easier:

 File | New | Create bar...

A dialog pops up and asks you to name your bar

I'm going to name mine "DemoBar" and I'm going to create a Vertical bar. The same steps would apply for a horizontal bar.

I like the menu bars because they feel very natural to me.  Horizontal bars make good replacements for the Windows default taskbar.  If you are looking for that, go with it.

I want my bar to match whatever WindowBlinds skin I am using so I choose the last option, "Use Skin from WindowBlinds" and I select the menu skin.  It's not the most exciting, but it alwasy renders correctly.  We'll play around with other settings after the bar is built.

And this is what we get:

It's a bar in the upper left corner of my screen with a default shortcut that does nothing.  The app creates a default Link element.  We're going to edit that first thing.  You could delete it if you wanted (See Adding, removing, Split group, Merge up, Hide group).

OB Elements

Down the left side of the editor is a list of all the available elements.  We're going to go through and add each one to our bar.  You may not use all of them for your bar but you never know, right?

Adding, removing, Split group, Merge up, Hide group

The buttons between the fields control what goes where. Add and remove are pretty self explanatory and the Split and merge will make more sense later. For now, just know that you should click on an element on the left and click the Add --> button to add it to your bar. (If you want to remove that first, default element, select it from the right pane, click the remove button, and confirm.)

Element Breakdown

I want to note here (because I'm not going to say it for every element) that all elements have a field called "Label".  This is what you will see on your bar.  You can change it at will to something that makes sense to you.

One other thing, OB is a click-able type of thing.  Mouseover won't do much for you.

Link (Shortcut or URL)

The first thing we'll do is customize the default shortcut to make it useful.

We give it a label; "Wincustomize" and put in the address ("http://wincustomize.com") in the Target field and we go from this:

To this:

And our bar looks like this:

Folder Menu (e.g. Programs)

What a powerful element! This allows you to link to any number of special Windows folders, normal directories, or open a file type.

Let's create a link to a special folder:

Add the Folder menu element and click on the browse button to configure the shortcut. There are lots of options here. [And these are the same options we'd have had we clicked the Browse button on the Link element above. This brings up and interesting point; there are lot's of ways to do the same thing in OB.  it's designed to be easy and powerful depending on how you use it.]

(there are a few pretty big images in this walk-trough, click on them to see the larger version)

We are going to choose the middle option, "Use special folder" and select "Programs"

While we're playing here, lets create another Folder (or Link) element and open a default application. Make sure to label. and confirm (by clicking OK) to add this element and start on the next one.

Add the folder, browse for a target, choose by extension, enter whatever extension you want (I'm using .txt in this example). Make sure to give your element a label! This will open the default app that opens that extension.

So we now have this:

Right clicking on a special folder gives you teh option to open the Windows system menu for that stuff.  You can do things like open, explore, copy, paste, zip, etc.

Popup Menu

This element creates a sub menu that you can do whatever you want in.  Each sub menu is it's own bar.  Make sure to name your bar in the upper right of the sub-bar.

If you want to edit the parent bar from here, click on the "Edit Parent Menu..." in the upper right, under the title of the child bar.

And we see this:

Various Function Item

This next element is a killer.  It can do so much. I'm going to create a shutdown dialog but you can see all the other options below.  Add the element, give it a name and click "Change"

System Commands:

More System Commands:

ObjectBar Commands:

Clipboard Commands:

Windows Commands:

And we see this:

Clock

Not much to this one.  You can get fancy but I'm cool with simple

And we get this:

Click on the clock and you get the day/date.  Double click and you get Windows Clock app.  :)

Taskbar (and a little more Various Function Item)

I'm jumping back a few items so I can keep a cleaner interface. I'm going to create the windows taskbar (what apps are running) but I want them to be able to be hidden.  So first, I create an object that hides that group, enter Various Function Item!  I choose the option that hides/shows the next Element group.  The next element group in this case is just the Taskbar. That may change later.

Then I add the Taskbar and use the automatic grouping.

And I get this (I'll rename the Hide/show in a sec using the Label field):

MFU List (Most Frequently used)

This isn't a element I use much but it has it's purpose

How many items do you want to list?  Change it here.

Here I'm going to do some grouping. I want to be able to hide the taskbar and the MFU list at the same time. I choose the MFU item in my bar and click on the merge up button. That's it. Easy to hide or show

Folder:

The difference between this Folder element and the Folder Menu element is that the Folder Menu element pops up a sub menu (although you can actually do the same thing there by checking the "Show folders in menu" on that config.  This option lays it right in the bar. This option works really well for small folders or in sub menus.

I'm going to insert another hider for this. (I'm going to call it "My Documents".)  While I'm at it, I'm going to rename the Taskbar/Most Frequently used grouping to "TS/MFU"

So my collapsed bar looks like this:

And expanded looks like this:

System Tray

This element duplicates the Windows system tray. This is one of my favorite elements!  If you customize your icons that have functionality (like how Multiplicity shows an active connection) they won't work anymore.

Also note that this element relies on SDMCP being installed and running.  If this is your first time installing and running ObjectBar you may not see anything here.  If after a reboot, you still don't see anything, grab and install the standalone SDMCP and reboot.

One other thing . . the systray hook is not functional in Vista yet.  The bright side is that everything else works great!

Looks pretty good!

Virtual Desktops

This is a separate application that really needs it's own tutorial, so I'm going to use the defaults.

And there we are:

DesktopX Widget

I'm going to skip DesktopX Widgets for a moment.  We'll get back to it.

Plugin

Plugins are there for folks to extend what OB can do. Most of the available plugins are now incorporated into the the major elements. The only one I use now is the Shadows.

Available plugins (I don't have any idea what the last one (WinXP Menu Extention) does):

The shadows are nice but the only one I use regularly is the Address bar and I actually add that from a different element. (More on that later

Separators

Separators add a line between groups.  I'm going to add four here. Nuthin' to it

Doesn't that look better?

RSS Feed:

Who doesn't like RSS feeds?  The default feed is to Wincustomize.com and I'm cool with that.

You can edit it if you want.

It's there, but it's ugly.

What I am going to do is create a pop-up menu and put it there.

So now I have this:

The next bunch of elements are really repackaged Plugins.  I like these more than the plugins.

Address bar:

This opens a form that allows you to enter either a URL or a file path on your PC or network

Mail checker:

Do I really need to say anything here?

Meters:

These show a nice bunch of graphs.  If you want more drive meters create one for your c: drive and edit the plugin for that drive.

Lets group the meters together and then add another Hide/Show element to get rid of them.

So now we have this:

Oh wait, it's DX time.

DesktopX Widget (Cont.):

OB support any DX widgets you want, just like Vista's sidebar, maybe better.

I want to add my music widgets.  I have taken the Silica player and modified it to shuffle and I have a volume widget that lets me mouse-over and spin the wheel to change the volume.  Lets add those in a sub menu called "Music" ok?

Add the DX element and click the Change Widget button.

Browse to your widget and double-click

I add another widget the same way and also add a Link element to Windows Media player while I'm there.  The goofiness in layout is due to my widgets, not OB. :)

Now let's move some things around to make it look nice using the Move element buttons on the far right of the editor

So here we are:

(Collapsed)

(Expanded)

Cool features:

Tear offs

You can tear off sub-menus and they will stay torn off until you click their title.

Here I tore off the RSS feed and the Music menu:

I like to put separators at the top of most of my sub-menus so I can get an easy grip.  No real need for the  two pictured though.

Autohide; Dock/Undock; Always on top, Task Manager, Theme Editor

Autohide

This option makes the bar hide towards the nearest side of the workspace.  Bumping that edge makes the bar appear.

Always on top

Does this need more information? This option keeps the bar on top of everything

Dock/Undock

This option makes a bar take up a whole edge of a screen.  If you use this option a new element is added to the editor that allows you to stick the extra space created

HotKeys

Every element can be assigned a hotkey that will bring that element (and the main bar) to the front. VERY, VERY COOL!

Using other skins

This ain't my thing, but it's there.

Browse around.  :)

Saving and Exporting

You've got options.

• "Save theme" saves it
• "Save theme as" rename the theme
• "Set theme description" allows you to set the author, version data for passing your bar around.
• "Pack up the entire theme" takes all the gadgets and skins and whatever you used as an obpack

Use this option if you are going to upload your creation to wincustomize.com
• "Export theme as standalone EXE" exports the theme with very little customization available but lets you share your bar with people without OB installed. :)

General options

I'm not going to cover these options, but there they are. I will note that starting with windows and hiding the OB icon are the choices I made.

My Favorite embedded DX Widgets

Some of these are in my root bar but some are in sub bars. It's your world, be happy.

	Hyalo Calendar by adni18
	Hyalo Weather by adni18
	Hyalo Media player by adni18
	Pandora's Box by RomanDA
	SPM-CLOCK-V2-10 by RomanDA