DesktopX 2.4 Developer’s Guide
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Page 34
4.2 Plugins
Starting with latest DesktopX 2 builds, the plugins issue has become more important, and a black
list is now in action (it is located in the DesktopX directory and can be edited to add or remove
listed plugins).
A first distinction is between so called “Old-style" plugins and “SD plugins”. The old style
plugins were built around the first very old plugin interface of DesktopX. The support is still in
DesktopX 2 but only for backward compatibility. These plugins are stored into the
\DesktopX\Plugins\ folder, and the objects using them have a slightly different GUI. They are
also recognizable because a warning message appear when editing them: "This object is using
old-style plugins...".
It is strongly suggested that you don’t use these old plugins for creating new objects and if
possible, update old objects to use new plugins. They can cause instability and maybe not be
supported in the future.
The plugins you should use are the ones built around the SD plugin specification, compatible
with DesktopX and ObjectBar and documented in the Developer section. Still, there have been
buggy plugins around that have forced us to blacklist them. On loading themes using them, you
have the option to continue loading or avoid that they are loaded.
Such plugins like DXToys, while providing some very cool features, could cause instability,
memory leaks, hang DesktopX and most important are often incompatible with the newest
Version 2 features.
We are in the process of updating the existing "safe" plugins and replacing the functionality
removed by blacklisting plugins with new updated plugins.
The only plugins you should use are the following ones. All other are old, buggy or obsolete.
- “Performance Meters 2” (DXPerf4.dll) – Performance monitoring.
- “DXPlayer” (DXPlayer.dll) – Media Player features.
- “Trash bin” (DXTrash.dll) – Updates object states accordingly to recycle bin status.
- “Analog Clock 2” (SDAnalogClock2.dll) – Antialiased clock arms.
- “Analog Clock 3” (SDAnalogClock3.dll) – Bitmapped clock arms.
- “Date (Text State)” (SDDateText.dll) – Sets the text of an object to the correct date. It
needs a text object.
- “Digital Clock (Text State)” (SDDigitalClockText.dll) – Sets the text of an object to the
corrent time. It needs a text object.
- “Email notify” (SDMailNotify.dll) – Updates object states accordingly to incoming mail.
