Dev-Picayune

Okay, I was feeling pretty good about the way things were going with the toolbar until I saw the following item: Mobydock. I reluctantly downloaded it. Now I am humbled. You have to have DirectX 9 to use the bar which tells you right away he’s doing some freaky cool stuff. I did go through a spell with it GPF’ing on me but overall it is amazing. The animation is great. I especially am amazed at the thumbnail preview of the web page when you have either IE or Firebird minimized. Even if you don’t launch a program via the bar it still knows you launched it anyway and marks the icon with an arrow (like the Mac OSX bar appears to do although I have never used it or seen it person). Overall I would have to say it is nothing short of extraordinary. Basically it kills my silly little enlarging icons and is about as big a discouragement as I could have gotten. The bright spots are: 1 - occassionally GPF’s because of the complex Direct X crap I suppose, 2 - no rotator to switch between multiple sets of icons, 3 - does not appear to be skinnable - at least as much as I can tell.