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Pogrelz, who has made a few other skinnable apps in the past, has released 3RVX. It is a volume control program with some nice bells and whistles. The screenshot shows off the alpha-blending, various displays, and gives you an idea of some of the creative freedom it gives skinners. It also has fade effects, drive eject notification, and other features. Pretty cool for a volume control.

Links:
• 3RVX
• Screenshot

CutTheRedWire : 25th November 2006  

A new development version of QCD (really QMP) came out: build 114. It has about 7 fixes, 3 updates, and 2 additions.

QCD is a excellent, fully skinnable, freeware music player. I can play most formats, and has all of the features you would expect from a modern player, including ripping/encoding. It has had steady development and a cult following for years. When the next stable release is made, it will officially be QMP (Quintessential Media Player). The development builds can already play movies.

No major changes in this release. If you had any trouble with freezing or other bugs, this build should help with that.

Changes:
• fixed core - template support not rendering disc# (bug #1661)
• fixed core - crash on setting fullscreen visuals (bug #1620)
• fixed plugin - freeze on skip while paused in crossfader (bug #1535, #1616)
• fixed plugin - mp3 plugin potential inifite loop fix
• fixed plugin - ID3v2.4 tag reading fix
• fixed plugin - OGG removing tag field fix (bug #1671)
• fixed ML - take into account disc# when sorting albums (bug #1665)
• updated plugin - WMA tagging implementation updated
• updated plugin - TagEditor lyrics/artwork/renamer UI improvements
• updated ML - changed 4pane UI to have optional split
• added core - WM_QCD_GET* RPC messages (See QCDCtrlMsgs.h in PDK)
• added ML - skipcount stats column

Links:
• QCD (QMD) Site
• Change List
• Download
• Screenshots

CutTheRedWire : 7th October 2006  

Rainlender, the skinnable calendar program, has a new beta out for its 2.0 release.

If you don't know what rainlender is, look around at some screen shots. You'll see it used often. The app has an excellent reputation. It also works as a LiteStep plugin, impressively. Here is a blurb from the help file:

"Rainlendar is a full featured calendar application. It can store your daily events and task and keep them visible on your desktop all the time. The appearance of the calendar can be changed with skins to make it match your desktop. The application is very customizable so you can configure it for your liking."

This release mainly focuses on fixes and improvements. The default skin now includes "a year calendar and simple digital clock window." If you had problems with it crashing, one of the variety of fixes should remedy that.

Changes:
• Multiple network calendars sometimes failed to authenticate. Fixed.
• Importing the old ini-files sometimes hanged the application. Fixed.
• The Outlook plugin doesn't use Unicode anymore to make it compatible with older Outlook versions.
• Dates before 1970 should work better now.
• The Linux version doesn't complain about stale lock files anymore.
• Skin addons can merge file contents.
• Cleaned up the log from unnecessary errors and warnings.
• Added a simple crash recovery. If a refresh crashes the application you have an option to switch to default values.
• The network plugin tries to download the data until it gets connection.
• Added TooltipTodoItems advanced option which can be used to define what the tooltip for todo items contains.
• More customization options (%HS and %HE) to the event list headers.
• Fixed a crash bug with the tray icon.
• Fixed a crash bug with some ics files.
• The Outlook plugin didn't read all the items. Fixed.
• Added "abbreviate" as the weekdays element's attribute. Values: 0=Full day names, 1=Abbreviations, 2=First letter only.
• Dropping the old ini-files on the calendar to import them works now too.
• Added a year calendar and a simple digital clock window to the default skin.

Links:
• Original Thread
• Windows
• Linux

CutTheRedWire : 7th October 2006  

Rainlender, the skinnable calendar program, has a new beta out for its 2.0 release.


If you don't know what rainlender is, look around at some screen shots. You'll see it used often. The app has an excellent reputation. It also works as a LiteStep plugin, impressively. Here is a blurb from the help file:

"Rainlendar is a full featured calendar application. It can store your daily events and task and keep them visible on your desktop all the time. The appearance of the calendar can be changed with skins to make it match your desktop. The application is very customizable so you can configure it for your liking."

This release adds the ability to Drag-n-drop skins, lock the position, and skins can now hold language packs.

Changes:
• Fixed few strings for better localization.
• Imported events from a ini-file didn't set the end date for recurrence correctly. Fixed.
• Added checks to the new calendar wizard that network files are not used as the file name.
• Linux: The correct executable path should be found now even if the application was started from a symbolic link.
• Added TimeFormat and DateFormat to advanced options.
• Date and time formats are taken from the locale on Windows. On Linux you need to manually override them.
• Zero years "(0)" is not added to birthdays and anniversaries anymore.
• Moved the default position of the windows upwards.
• Months can be changed with the wheel also over the month.
• Added time format codes to the help.
• Added possibility to lock the windows in place.
• The user is notified if a new birthday or anniversary event is created which has no recurrence.
• Added %D to the EventListHeaderFormat.
• The icons were not drawn correctly if they were on multiple rows. Fixed.
• The Outlook plugin doesn't scan subfolders anymore unless they are under a calendar or task folder.
• Added support for drag'n'dropping. You can install skins, languages, license file and import ics-files by dropping them over one of the windows.
• Added bullets to the todo-list.
• Added "ignoredefault" to the skins category definitions which can be used to ignore the default event appearance for the category.
• Linux: The lock file is stored in the config folder instead of the user's home folder.
• If the ~/.config folder exists Rainlendar will store its settings to there.
• Added FontScale to advanced options which can be used to change the font sizes in the windows.
• Linux: Fixed a crash bug with the tray icon.
• If the user removes all active windows from the advanced skin options, the default windows are used automatically.
• Calendars-submenu didn't work from the tray icon. Fixed.
• The skins can have addons (e.g. language packs) which are merged with the original skin.
• Added SkinLanguage to the advanced options.

Links:
• Original Thread
• Windows
• Linux

CutTheRedWire : 21st September 2006