Ive had enough. 

After months of digging into the inner workings of WPF, coding up crazy threading hacks and questionable bit logic trying to figure out why it was so doggedly slow for the litle amount of code I have put into it. I started wondering "am I really this bad of a programmer?"  Ive come to find out that the WPF dispatcher prioritizes  rendering operations higher than keyboard input: the opposite of Windows forms.  Ive also discovered that if you try to push the rendering priority lower than that of the input (you apparantly are not allowed to increase the user input priority) nothing ever renders.

Peachy.

What I was able to create, which looks rather good if you happen to be lucky enough to be running an uber fast computer with a good video card, is an attractive bezel interface with expand and contract animations depending on whether or not you are going to be using the parameters pane.  It also has a nice reflection effect on the icons in the panes.  The problem is, if you are running it on a laptop (even one with 2 gb of RAM) it takes like 300 milliseconds between keypresses to register that a key has been pressed.  Way to slow for an app called "Mercury".  

 I might as well rename it to DOMolasses.

Because of this, the fact that I am not and never wanted to be a UI designer (I like to code things that do things, not code that changes the way things look)  I am posting the WPF code I do have in the repository  (Bezel++) this weekend for someone else to troubleshoot and calling it a wrap.

I have had people submitting very good looking skins lately (Thanks David and tysiva) so I think I am content to let the interface stay as it is for a while.  I was losing a lot of DOMercury momentum dealing with that interface and I really missed programming new functionality into DOMercury.

 To show everybody that I definately have not abandoned DOMercury, I just released the GMail plugin today.  You can check it out on the Plugins Page 

Its pretty neat.  It imports your contacts from GMail and allows you to open Compose Mail windows directly to them from DOMercury.  It does some other stuff of course, like opening a blank compose window, opening to a search of your GMail, or just going to your inbox.  Ive found it very handy in the 4 hours I've been using it already.

 Side note:  Since I dislike writing code for aesthetics, the site redesign has been taking forever as well.  Sorry about that.

-Dominick