A2 thread: wishes and ideas

[Bonejob]

As an enhancement to Aston2 I would suggest the ability for a folder category element to scan a folder and sub folders and auto add them to the bar. for example I have all my games in the folder d:\games. I would select "Folder Auto scan" from the Object Type drop down and if there is a working folder (Top level start of scan folder) it would zip through and add all exe to the list. I then have the ability to delete any exe's I don't want. This could be refreshed on demand.

Bone

[deardorff]

One thing I would love to see, is basically what windows active desktop eluded to be, which it never was. A fully interactive desktop, with animated desktop backgrounds, animated icons, maybe even a flowing gui system that would incorporate a flowing zooming desktop. For instance,...

Homeworld 2,... The desktop would be a planetary system, zoomed out so you can see all of it. Moving the mouse over a planet, would display what programs are in it, via small names and icons, a click would result in the planet taking up the entire screen as if in orbit of it, and display all the programs in some neatly organized way. Then clicking an X icon would zoom away, back to the solar system view.

If its done in video games like homeworld, It should be able to be done as a shell as well. The result could redefine how we use computers. I have built several game levels using Unreal Engine, for Unreal tournament 2004, the beauty of its design is all repeating items are only loaded once in the memory, no matter how many times they appear to the eye in the game, hence you have massive, and complex levels, that require little to no memory usage.

For instance the theme with the black hole as a background, why not have the black hole be animated, and rotate? A Simple looping gif file or something should make a huge difference, esthetically to the desktop. Its a simple change, but a big difference to look at.

[FireSign]

it would be good if there was a shoutbox like feuture, like a little button maybe ontop of where it says the time, and you press it and a small box comes out and you can talk to others with aston and this feuture , and to keep aston as light weight as possible, have another button next to shoutbox that you press to connect/disconnect so it doesnt try connecting you on start up.

and it would be cool if you could pull up little rag dolls that r 'alive' out of buttons and move them around and stuff XDXD

[SupaNova]

Okay, after weeks of testing, and mastering this shell...I am now in love ...many friends are amazed by it, the themes, and its ease of use. BUT!! and theres always a but, the few things that yet need to be added to make it perfect.

1. We need an option for the toppanel that has a box that confirms a delete of an item.."are you sure you would like to remove this item." etc.

Reason.. I loaded at least 15 programs into one item labeled 'system'...This took me a great deal of 15 minutes to complete just to add the shortcuts. When they were all done, a few days later, my mouse batteries went low, and when I intended to add a 'new sub item' I clicked 'remove item' and it was all gone ...At least if the box pops up asking, then I could answer no...

2. I need drag and drop and copy/cut and paste from and onto start and manually added taskbar.
3. Need my desktop option back please. Save files direct to desktop.
4. A hotkey to show the toppanel ontop of other windows.

Currently, the plugin for top panel ontop does not work with some themes.

Edit: Sorry, there is no top panel 'always ontop option', that was the Aston Panels I guess.

5. So I guess I would like an option to always have my top panel items ontop of all windows. A Plugin maybe.?

Other than that. Id say its pretty cool.

Aston rules...

[Veratil]

[btsht23]

[nikhilmitta]

Well, this thread has been going on since 2 years. Does anyone know when Aston 2 will be out?

[haxer]

As of right now, no.

[Krusty Ruffle]

I would like to see support for rotating displays, or at least the ability to set object positioning relative to points other than top-left.

I have a widescreen LCD which runs natively at 1680x1050, when that rotates to 1050x1680 a lot of things end up way off the screen. I've even tried to set it up differently and save the themes at the new resolution, but this has its own problems. It seems that Aston 1.9.3 doesn't notice when the resolution changes, making it necessary to switch to a different theme, then rotate, then switch back to the theme I want, but even then a lot of the plugins do not respect the setting for the new resolution and position themselves in the last spot you had them. This is a huge pain in the butt...

The easy fix would be to position some things relative to different corners f the screen, especially if it could be done relatively instead of absolutely, as in "Bottom-Right, -20%,-10%" or some such thing


Thanks for giving me the opportunity to have constructive input...

[Edit]
Another thing that would be nice is if the transparent parts of an object would let other objects show through. For instance, you have a round clock, if you place it to close to another object the transparent corners will chop off part of the other object. It would be a bit better if this didn't happen...
[/Edit]

[haxer]

[Krusty Ruffle]

[haxer]

Ah, I see what you mean. When I read it the first time I checked with amonitor. I did get it to work with the toppanel though. All you have to do is set the clock to desktop (under Z order) and the panel to normal. that should solve your problem.

Also, something you might play around with is the order the plugs are in in the plugin area of astmaster. I personally have no idea if this will effect anything, but you never know.

[Krusty Ruffle]

Thanks for the advice, playing with the z-orders can get things to work how I wanted

But, it would still be nice if you didn't have to do that so I'll leave it as a suggestion for the next version...

[haxer]

yep, I agree.

[Liderc]

Personally, I'd like to see support for .tga's, but that's just me.