A Guided Tour
ObjectBar is a program that can replace or extend the Windows Start bar. It provides the functionality of the Start bar but does it faster and with vastly more features. Because it is so flexible and skinnable, it can be made to look like any sort of wharf, bar, finder, dock, etc. found on any OS. Or it can be used to create something entirely new, giving both corporate IT managers and end users the ability to design and implement a desktop interface specifically for their usage. It improves user productivity and provides a level of personalization to the Windows desktop interface previously not possible.
Benefits for Windows 98/ME/2000 users:
The full Windows XP Start bar
Ability to group tasks in the taskbar
Most commonly used programs automatically added to the Start bar
Benefits for all users (including Windows XP users):
Group running programs together any way the user wishes
System Tray filtering (pick which tray items are displayed)
Configurable Personalized (Smart Menus) to display only the program items you regularly use
Fully skinnable and a host of visual effects
Virtual Desktops via ControlBands
Can incorporate Menus into the bar and hide them in the program
Relatively easy to configure
Configurable right click pop-up menu
Ability to simulate virtually any operating system's desktop environment or create a completely new one.
Faster than the real start bar
Tear off menus
Can automatically use WindowBlinds skins
There is no program quite like ObjectBar. No one has ever set out to create a "better start bar than start bar". Microsoft did a great job with the Start bar, particularly with the one on Windows XP. And ObjectBar's challenge was more than just being a better start bar than than what comes with Windows, it was to be better than all of the desktop interfaces found on all desktop OSes (MacOS, Linux, OS/2, etc.). This means ObjectBar has to be able to combine their features together seamlessly and plus have additional features. This tour will give you a taste of what ObjectBar can do along with things it will be able to do in the future.
If you use the Windows classic ObjectBar theme then ObjectBar looks just like the Start bar found in Windows 98/ME/2000/XP (classic). No real big deal. You have personalized menus which can be turned off and on and that sort of thing.
When you right click on the bar and go to properties (or on the ObjectBar icon in your system tray - after you've rebooted) you can quickly see that all is not as it seems. Whereas the Start bar's configuration is relatively simple - you can choose a few different toolbars, ObjectBar goes far beyond that. What exactly does that mean?
Well for one thing, it means that you can move your Start bar sections anywhere you want. Unlike the default Start bar, ObjectBar lets you put your Start button and system tray anywhere you want (no other program on the market can do this btw). For most people, this is just "cool" but not particularly useful. Where it becomes useful is for corporations who want to get rid of the Start button entirely or get rid of the system tray.
ObjectBar can also group tasks together. This is similar to what Windows XP did it (though when we designed ObjectBar, Windows XP didn't exist so both Stardock and Microsoft independently came up with this concept). Obviously, if you're not running Windows XP, ObjectBar provides a pretty nice feature. But even if you do use Windows XP, ObjectBar's way of grouping tasks is far far more flexible...
The first reason why it's so much better is that all menus in ObjectBar are tear off. If you hold down the Ctrl key on top of a menu, you can tear it off and move it. Imagine if you're talking to several people via Instant messenger - you can tear off that menu and have it float on your desktop.
Here are the tear off menus taken to their logical conclusion. Not only are the task group menus tear offs but you can do this with any menu. This can be very useful in dealing with your documents and program groups that you want to have sitting on your desktop for quick access. This is a nice alternative over having to have 30 icons cluttering up your desktop.
One of the cooler features in newer versions of Windows are personalized menus. ObjectBar provides that functionality in the form of smart menus. Smart menus go well beyond what personalized menus can do by allowing users to choose the threshold of when items are hidden. The user, rather than Microsoft, determines the time.
So far, we have been showing a bar that looks like the the standard Windows 98 Start bar pretty much. There's a reason for that - ObjectBar is not a toy. Too often programs come out that try to show off how nice they look visually but provide little in actual productivity benefit. With ObjectBar, we want to stress that the primary point of it is that it is faster and more powerful than the start bars and wharfs and finders and whatnot found in various operating systems and it is for that reason one would want to use it. The fact that it is the most flexible, skinnable program of its kind should be just seen as a bonus. We'll talk more later about just how flexible its skinning is.
That said, as you can see, you can define what shows up on your task list. This is important for power users because they often have many programs running adn their task lists become crowded with many things that they don't really care about. With ObjectBar, one thing you can do is have it not display any asks except for ones you specifically have. In the above example, we have hidden all but 3 tasks. So for a software developer, everything else is hidden. Of course, how do you get to those other tasks if you want? That's answered below...
In this example (and it is important to emphasize that this is just an example, not the only way this could be done) I have added a pop up task icon onto my Start bar. When I click on it, it shows all my running tasks.
Here you can actually see my tasks icon (just to the left of the Microsoft Spy ++ task button). So okay, so far we've just done the old Windows classic bar and the XP start bar. If we want to do others, we can do one of two things: 1) We can just change the style of the bars on my screen or 2) load up an entirely different theme. The difference is that in the first case, I'm basically just skinning my existing bars with a different skin. In the second case, I'm loading up an entirely new set of bars. Put another way, in the shareware world, each "theme" could be its own program for download. I.e. Stardock could easily just release a program called "MacBarTheme" in which it's just a skinnable Finder. And release a second $20 program called "XPStartBar" that is just a replacement Windows Start bar. In ObjectBar, these distinctly different interfaces are merely themes and they can share skins with one another.
If I just change my style (skin), ObjectBar comes with several options. And with a click, the entire bar can look different. If you don't have Windows XP, this is particularly nice. If you do have Windows XP, it's still quite nice because many users simply don't like that green start button in XP. If you look closely, there is key feature displayed here -- "Use WindowBlinds skin". WindowBlinds 3 will skin the Windows XP Start bar. Because of its popularity, it has a lot of skin author support. This would normally make the two programs a bit at odds - you want to see all those cool new Start bar skins people are making but you also want the features and functionality of ObjectBar. ObjectBar and WindowBlinds are both developed by Stardock and as a result, they can share skins to a degree between them. So ObjectBar can use those WindowBlinds start bar skins if you're running the Windows XP theme.
Let's load up a different theme. MacPC. Now you have some of the features found in MacOS but in a Windows environment. If you click on the Windows icon in the top left, you get a personalized menu. Again, the emphasis here isn't "Oh look, it looks like a Mac, isn't that nice?" The point is to have something that users can actually use full time.
If I click on the general options of ObjectBar, it can made it so that your programs have their menus hidden and become part of the bar at the top instead. Bear in mind that this feature uncovers a UI problem in Windows - many programs, particularly by Microsoft don't have menus. Instead they use toolbars that look like menus (i.e. they violate UI convention). So this works on most programs but not on several very well known ones.
Here is that feature in action. See how MS Paint, MS Notepad and MS Calc no longer have menus? The bar at the top becomes context sensitive and takes over the menu features of the program. This can save quite a bit of screen space.
Example of ObjectBar using the currently selected WindowBlinds skin.
One feature many users requested was the ability to replace the pop-up menu when you right click on the desktop. In ObjectBar this is done in a fairly straight forward way - you create a bar, then assign it to be your right click menu. In this example, I am creating the bar I want to have pop up when I right click. Remember, literally any bar you create (no matter how strange) can be used. To stress its utility value (instead of its "oh cool, that looks neat but I would never use that" value) I am creating a bar that has an option to hide all my windows and to paste shortcuts. But check out the next section - my most frequently used programs. ObjectBar, like Windows XP, can keep track of the programs you use the most automatically. I have set it to display the 3 programs I use the most (this could be as many as you want to show). Under that is a link to show my entire program list, a quick "new folder" item (many users have complained that the new-> option in the right click menu is extremely slow because so many programs add themselves to the list when 99% of the time the user just wants to create a new folder) and of course the properties option which will bring up Display properties. In short, for most people this is a far more useful right click menu than what comes with Windows.
Here is that right click pop up in action.
As previously mentioned, there are dozens of different themes. Any OS wharf/bar/finder/dock/etc. can be done with ObjectBar. ObjectBar supports the SDPlugin specification which means plugins created for DesktopX will also work with ObjectBar (virtual desktops, stock tickers, MP3 players, you name it can all be placed in your bars easily).
Another example theme. This one created by Scratch. Screenshots are very limited for showing off what ObjectBar can do. For instance, bars can auto hide themselves. One favorite theme has a bar that slides in from the side when the mouse is moved to that side of the screen. Other themes have various bars appear when a user clicks on a button on a totally different bar.
ObjectBar v1
Developed by: Stardock.net, Inc.
List price: $19.95 stand alone or as part of Object Desktop which is $49.95.
Stardock's home page: http://www.stardock.com
ObjectBar's home page: http://www.stardock.com/products/objectbar
Free demo available on ObjectBar's home page.