My first Deesktop X widget: launch central

How it came to be

Published on March 11, 2005 By ZubaZ In Objects & Widgets

The company I work for does IT support. Our focus is moving users closer to solving their own problems; self-service.

We have three major componants and they ar all web based. But users don't know how to get to them. It's a marketing problem really.

So Wedneday at 11:30 PM in bed I had an idea to build a launcher. Somehting that sat on the desktop and obviosly provided links to the tools. I whipped out the TabletPC. Opened Journal and drew out the design. {Picture to follow as soon as remember what PC it's saved on.}

The next morning I open MS Paint and started drawing buttons and stuff.
Background:

Button:

InfoPanel:

They stunk. Horribly.
So I thought to myself . . that aero thing is pretty popular at WinCustomize Link
, I'll see if there is an image I can use like that. And lo and behold, there it was; an aero template by Brad Wardell.

So I grab that and start building my objects. I resized that one image over and over again for different functions. I then added a few text objects on top of my graphpical objects. Set them to do nothing.
I then added actions to my buttons; launch the right tool. Easy enough.
Now for the infopanel; I wanted to have a description of the tool displayed when a user moused over the button. By sending messages to a bunch of new text objects (with different states for mouse over and mouse away) on top of the infopanel I accomplished this.

I tried to add a fourth button to show system stats. I go the meters to work, but I couldn't get them to go away when mousing over the other buttons. Something to work on later.

Then I added a minimize object, locked everything down, and exported.

Total build time: under two hours

I also want to get the widget to start minimized. But for that I need code. And for code I need to study.

That brings up a good point. To build this object I didn't need to know any code. The property fields for objects in DX is wicked easy to understand.

So there I had it, my first DesktopX object:

I wanted to share my object with the community at WC. But the tools referenced are all on the intranet or otherwise non-accessible. So I updated the Text on the three button objects and title. Updated the descriptions on the infopanel objects.
Updated the URLs on the button objects to point to some great sites. Exported and uploaded.
Total time: 23 minutes
Launch Central

Download:
Link (DesktopX required)

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