Master!!! The Monster LIVES!!! or… the Return of Active Desktop
Yesterday, the blogosphere was all a-twitter as Niall Kennedy announced that he has joined Microsoft and will be helping to turn Live.com into a platform for feeds. Live.com will be the default homepage for Windows Vista as well. Cool, and congratulations Niall!
Richard McManus over at ZDNet posted his interpretation:
- It’s going to be a huge boost for RSS, because everyone will be using it and aggregating it.
- It will mean pushing Windows Live search at the expense of MSN ad revenue.
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It will mean the world of gadgets (aka widgets or modules) and web services will go mainstream.
Richard’s right – an RSS platform in the OS will be huge — just like Microsoft’s inclusion of TCP/IP in the OS was huge for the internet in the Windows 95 time frame.
Does it really matter if MSN ad revenue is impacted? By moving search into Windows Vista directly, Microsoft is ensuring that the first search the customer encounters will be Microsoft. Live.com search still has advertising in it. Revenues are likely to be larger when generated directly from Vista as opposed to MSN. Monetizing the desktop with ad revenue was the dream that Brad Chase had in 1998 when the Channel Bar was conceived. It looks as if it might finally become a reality.
And on a cautionary note, does anyone remember Active Desktop, the technology that the Channel Bar was based upon? Rom Impas, Joe Belfiore, myself and some others dreamt this dog up in the days just after the Windows 95 launch. It allowed you to embed HTML content and ActiveX controls on the Windows desktop. Turned the whole thing into a page full of live feeds and widgets. We thought it was cool, but after using it for a bit everyone turned it off because it wasn’t really that compelling and it was a resource pig. Active Desktop or gadgets… hmmm… the gadgets are cool, but after a while I just turned them off… more feeds are more compelling to me than a widget that lets me calculate foreign exchange. The moral of the story? The potential of the RSS platform is huge, but it’s not in recreating yesterday’s failed push platforms like Active Desktop, and PointCast.
"Live.com. Bride of Active Desktop. Come see the movie! You’ll laugh, you’ll cry!"
… and hopefully the villagers won’t feel they have to kill the monster at the end.
April 12th, 2006 at 4:09 pm
I’m glad to see I wasn’t the only one who thought Active Desktop was cool, but then turned it off because it was a resource hog. Cool idea though :-)
April 12th, 2006 at 5:49 pm
I thought active desktop was cool too, but I turned it off because it was unstable! Remember that message? (there has been some sort of failure, try disabling active desktop). I would have left it on otherwise…
April 12th, 2006 at 9:37 pm
Some things just aren’t meant to be… like peanut butter and mayonnaise… We thought people would like to have active things on the desktop, but it turns out that they’d rather just use the desktop as temporary storage.
April 13th, 2006 at 4:05 pm
[...] Active Desktop [...]
July 8th, 2006 at 7:32 pm
I have over 8000 hits every day from people that are using my Active Desktop feeds.
It’s a major step backward for Windows Vista to disable this feature.
I will be wasting time recoding the pages to flash, or something to be show movies, images and sound content on the desktop.
Apple Leopard is going to implement webpages as desktops, from the rumours I hear.
The stupid “Active Desktop gallery” that Microsoft provided didn’t help to push the platform.
The active desktop scheduler was buggy, and could bring a whole system to a standstill.
I use javascript for the scheduling function, which is 100% reliable.
Erich
http://opefs.com
October 13th, 2006 at 9:06 am
I’m going to miss Active Desktop. I use the feature at work to provide a custom web page that provides the machine name, a Frequently Called Numbers list, and announcements that aren’t time sensitive. If the feature isn’t included in Vista, I guess it’s back to searching for alternatives. I haven’t tried it yet but a gadget on the desktop just might do the trick. What do you think?
December 3rd, 2006 at 6:30 am
I love active desktop, use it for a wide variety of things. In fact I will not upgrade to Vista, unless they bring it back.
December 3rd, 2006 at 6:34 am
You know what is going to happen - Apple is going to make HTML as background cool, and Windows will look foolish for abandoning it.
HTML as desktop background was an interesting technology, and I don’t see what Windows gains by getting rid of it. Gadgets are boxy, businessy and lame.
February 5th, 2007 at 8:30 am
I monitor my business uptime via active desktop. it’s the single-most frequently used feature of XP I have.
Vista’s majorly moronic for removing this…
….
Mind you - now I think about this - building a “.hta” file with some javascript to switch off all the borders, titles, and buttons etc - it would not be so hard to simulate an active desktop that way…
February 5th, 2007 at 8:50 am
Ha! yep. I was right. The following snipped, when saved in a file ending with “.hta” (HTml Application), simulates the old active desktop!!!
Vista Active Desktop
‘On Error Resume Next
window.resizeTo 410, 360
window.moveTo 123, 345
Enjoy!!!
February 5th, 2007 at 8:51 am
Ha! yep. I was right. The following snipped, when saved in a file ending with “.hta” (HTml Application), simulates the old active desktop!!! (remover to replace all ] with “greater than” symbol > and all [ with less-than symbol
February 5th, 2007 at 8:52 am
Ha! yep. I was right. The following snipped, when saved in a file ending with “.hta” (HTml Application), simulates the old active desktop!!! (remover to replace all ] with “greater than” symbol > and all [ with less-than symbol < (this blog doesn't allow HTML postings...)
[html][head][title]Vista Active Desktop[/title]
[HTA:APPLICATION ID="Vista Active Desktop"
APPLICATIONNAME="Vista Active Desktop" SCROLL="no"
CAPTION="no" BORDER="none" INNERBORDER="no" MAXIMIZEBUTTON="no"
COPYRIGHT="Free as per GPL v3. This comment must not be removed. http://www.ChrisDrake.com"
NAVIGABLE="no" CONTEXTMENU="no" SINGLEINSTANCE="yes" ICON="C:\Windows\System32\acwizard.ico"]
[script language="VBScript"]
‘On Error Resume Next
window.resizeTo 410, 360
window.moveTo 123, 345
[/script]
[/head]
[body BOTTOMMARGIN=0 LEFTMARGIN=0 RIGHTMARGIN=0 SCROLL="no" TOPMARGIN=0
BGCOLOR="ECE9D8" xonLoad="document.body.innerHtml=obj.fn('parm')"]
[iframe src="http://www.lego.com/" style="width:410; height:360"][/iframe]
[/body][/html]
Enjoy!!!
April 1st, 2007 at 11:33 pm
Sorry to comment so late, but I just found Chris’s solution. It works pretty good, but it has two shortcomings. 1) If I see the .hta window behind other windows and click on it, it comes to the front like a regular window (instead of not coming to the front, like the desktop). 2) If I click on “Show Desktop” in the Quick Launch, the .hta window minimizes like the other windows.
April 2nd, 2007 at 2:47 am
Cool, Can you set the .HTA as your background though
May 24th, 2007 at 10:08 am
How do you set this HTA file as your background.. because I can’t do it in Right click dekstop –> graphic properties??
anyone ? can you explain it to me ?
June 10th, 2007 at 5:10 pm
Yes…active desktop did have useful features, but if you ever had to fight off Smitfraud or the other desktop hijackers you can understand the loss of Active Desktop wasn’t mourned too greatly by anti-spyware fighters. Tens of millions of PCs have been infected by the scoundrels over the past several years.
September 17th, 2007 at 12:12 am
Check out avedesktop sites. (http://mpj.tomaatnet.nl/vista/) its a program that adds activedesktop functionality to vista. sadly, you cannot interact with the website on your desktop. slightly better than chris’ code cause it doesn’t behave like an app… doesn’t minimise.
June 28th, 2008 at 12:39 am
I still use windows 98, and see no reason to “upgrade.” If I want the new look, I’ll install the revolutions pack - and still have my active desktop!
I relly want some of those active desktop gadgets. Where can I get them now? Where is the active desktop gallery?
August 14th, 2008 at 8:21 pm
Active Desktop is not back, it does not live…what a useless badly written article