The first thing that you need to grasp is setting the appearance of a basic object. From the previous section you will be aware that an object can have several states and this is the section where you can set an appearance for each state. The only constraint that you have is that the imaage which appears on screen must be the same size for every state.

You have 3 different choices for the appearance of an object; Image, Text or Plugin.

Images use an image file (BMP, ICO or PNG) to define the object. These images may be animated or have different degrees of transparency.

Text can be used as a quick and simple way of creating an object. There are limitations to this in that the text must be the same in each state.

Plugins are add-ons for DesktopX written by developers, and these can define the appearance of an object.

We will now go through each one in detail.

Image
A DesktopX object will accept any BMP, ICO or 32-bit PNG file as a source for the object. Graphics already used in your theme will be listed in the drop-down box, or you can click 'Browse' to find a file on your hard-drive.

Different file types have different implications:

Bitmaps (BMP) do not have transparency by default, but can mimic transparency by using 'magic pink' pixels.

Icon (ICO) files are actually bitmaps but typically of small size and limited colour depth. If your source graphic is an ICO file, the 'Icon Size' option will be available. By default the icon will be displayed at a size of 32x32 pixels, but here you can quickly resize the image, without using the advanced options.

PNG files have the most flexibility in their native format because they have transparency built in, but fewer applications can save files in this format.

The final option on the Image screen is the 'Advanced' button. If you click on this button the dialogue on the right will be displayed, and here you can scale the object horizontally and/or vertically.

In each case, you don't have to scale the entire object, you can leave areas at the edges unscaled if you wish. For horizontal scaling you can specify the point A and point B. Pixels to the left of A are not scaled, neither are pixels to the right of B. This is the same for vertical scaling using points C and D.

For the pixels in between, you can choose to either tile (repeat) the pixels in between, or stretch them to cover the size of the object.

When you set these parameters, you can then set the appropriate object size in the summary tab.

 

Text
This is a quick and easy way to make objects.

Simply enter the text that you want to appear in the box, and use the other options to customise the appearance of the text.

One thing to note is that if you want to specify the colour of the font you should use the 'Change colour' button, rather than the colour options that appear in the 'Change font' dialogue. This allows you a choice from the full range of colours, rather than the standard 16 available in Windows.

You can anti-aliase the edge of the fonts to make them shother, and create a shadow for the text by choosing the appropriate checkbox.

 

Plugin
There are plugins created which determine how the object should appear by themselves. This is typically because the appearance of the object changes dynamically.

To use a plugin simply choose the plugin from the existing ones on your machine or 'Browse' for one.

The 'Information' tab allows you to check the details of the plugin such as the version number.

Most plugins will require some configuration to customise their appearance, and you can access these parameters by clicking the 'Configure' tab.

More information on plugins is available in the plugins section.