Modifying Widgets

How to tweak widgets you download

By Brad Wardell

So you've found some widgets you like but you want to tweak them.  How do you do that with DesktopX?

First we should probably explain some basic concepts of DesktopX.  There are many different programs these days that let you deal with widgets and each one has its own take on the concept.

In DesktopX, widgets are executables -- .EXEs.  That means you don't need to even have DesktopX running to use them. They're just like any other program. You only need to have DesktopX installed on your computer to use them.

But if you want to edit a widget, you need to bring it back inside the DesktopX environment.  In DesktopX, everything is an object. These objects can be grouped together and exported as a widget. Or they can be exported as a desktop theme if you build an entire desktop.  You can also export groups of objects as an object pack if you decide to just run your "widgets" as part of your DesktopX environment (the advantage is they use less memory since they don't have the overhead of running as a program but the disadvantage is that you have to run DesktopX all the time).

The analogy we use is to think of DesktopX being like Microsoft Word and widgets being .PDF files (Acrobat documents).  You can certainly read your documents in Microsoft word (like you can run widgets as objects in DesktopX).  You can of course read Acrobat files on their own. And if you want to edit an Acrobat file you have to find a way to bring it back into a word processor like Microsoft Word to edit.

So for this example, I have downloaded a clock widget. It's called CoreClock.exe.

It's a very nice widget that lets me change the color of the edge and I can resize it too on the fly. But it's too dark for my tastes.

So I load up DesktopX and choose import.

Then I click on the "widgets" option in the import dialog so that it will display my installed widgets and then select the clock.

So here I have my two clocks. The one on the left is the original widget running as its own process.  The one on the right has been imported as a grouped set of DesktopX objects.

So I right click on my clock and go to the states tab and change the hue and brightness of it to be brighter.

Now that I'm done, I right click on it and choose export.

I want to export both the selected object and the related objects (i.e. the whole clock). I am exporting it as a widget (If I had DesktopX Pro I could export it as a stand-alone program that would run on everyone's computer).

I gave it an icon and name here. I don't like widgets using up taskbar and system tray items but I have that option.

And here's my final result ready to use as a widget.

 Click here to view link.