Hey everyone, hope you had a great week and have some fun things planned for the weekend!  This was a busy week with updates coming for both DeskScapes and CursorFX.  Lots more good stuff is coming up so now is a great time to tell your friends and family about things like Object Desktop and WinCustomize.  Spread the skinning word!

Now for this weeks picks!

Welcome to another edition of This Week in Skinning, the web’s best and only weekly guide to skins, themes, and any other desktop customization skins you can find.  Being it’s October, we are seeing some more Halloween skins roll in, but lets try to get that number even higher over the next week or so! 

Now for this weeks picks!

The end of September…..oh my!  We are winding down this year awfully quickly and I hope to see some cool Halloween desktops this month.  WinCustomize got a slight update this week just adding some social networking buttons and moving the upload button to a more prominent position in the navigation bar.

Now for this weeks picks!

I have been looking at WinCustomize and realize that in the almost 5 years that I have been here I have written so many articles that I really have no idea how many I have done.  One thing is for sure, and that’s it sure is a lot of them! 

It’s cool to see that an article I wrote in 2007 has been viewed about 400,000 times!

http://islanddog.joeuser.com/article/147986

If you noticed I linked to the article on JU.  Why?  Well honestly because I couldn’t find it on WC.   Which brings me to my something I have been working on as trying to find articles, guides, etc. on WC can be challenging.  I was trying to think of an easy way to bookmark items that others can view for quick access.  Obviously your browser can bookmark things, but I don’t like to crowd up my browser bookmarks with such things.

I saw that Delicious got a big redesign and one of its new features is Stacks.

This is exactly what I was looking for!  I’m going  to place the most common and useful articles, guides,etc. here so people can easily find and link to them.

What do you think?  Will this help any of you?

http://delicious.com/stacks/view/K0hhfC#m=list

I also tried Pinboard, which has a much simpler view - http://pinboard.in/u:islanddog/t:WinCustomize/

Microsoft is working on Windows 8 which will have a new experience called “Metro” that will serve as an alternative to the traditional Windows desktop. It’s been optimized for tablet computing and looks phenomenal.

Meanwhile, Stardock has been working for the past year on having a Metro experience on the Windows desktop.

Tiles is something new. It is not a “side bar”. It is not a virtual desktop program. Rather, it lets users organize all their “stuff” into Metro-style pages that can be switched between to instantly gain access to the windows, programs, and data relevant to that page.

To add something to a page, the user merely drags and drops the active window over to it (or alternatively the URL or document or program short-cut). It’s a new way of working with Windows that adheres to the concepts Microsoft has pioneered with the Windows Phone UI and soon in Windows 8.

Video demo: youtu.be/5dPmRbyAY5s

To learn more visit: www.stardock.com/products/tiles

Summer is almost over and what a summer it was!

The summer started with Stardock selling its Impulse digital distribution platform to GameStop. This was the first time in Stardock’s history that it has ever sold one of its business units.

The reason Stardock sold Impulse was because Impulse’s success was starting to come at the expense of the other two parts of Stardock – the software and games groups which had seen resources being taken from them to put onto Impulse to handle its amazing growth. If Stardock’s goal was to become predominantly a digital retailer, that would have been fine, but it wasn’t. Stardock’s primary objective is to make cool stuff, not sell other people’s cool stuff.

In the near-term, our software and games will continue to be purchased, downloaded and updated exclusively through Impulse. But we expect to have a new, albeit much simpler, digital distribution system for Stardock’s own software and games up and running before the end of the year that you’ll be able to start purchasing, downloading, and updating through. We must warn you, however. It won’t be anywhere near as expansive as Impulse or even Stardock Central. It’ll just be there for making it quick to download and update your stuff. Very un-intrusive.

So by now, many of you have probably seen some of the videos of Windows 8.  If you haven’t, let me walk you through it.

The Windows 8 experience is going to be dominated by a new user interface currently called “Metro”. There’s no “desktop” which means no taskbar, no system tray no start menu. You work with Windows in a way that’s similar to the way one would work with their iPad or Android device.

I have to say, I think it’s pretty cool in many respects. Or more to the point, I think it will be cool once they iron out all the usability gotchas in it (which I think may take them a version or two).

Making Metro make sense

That’s where Stardock’s upcoming program, Tiles comes in. A couple of years ago, when I started seeing what Microsoft was doing with what came to be called Windows Phone, I thought about how the current Windows desktop metaphor was pretty long in the tooth.

So I got talking to Neil (the lead on such programs like WindowBlinds and Multiplicity) and sketched out how one might manage their stuff in the future.  We’d already made virtual desktop programs in the past as well as various side-bar programs (Control Center and ObjectBar to name two). 

What we needed was something that made sense in today’s PC world. A world where lots of people have multiple monitors and are increasingly dealing with tasks that involve lots of different programs and are running systems that might be up for days or weeks at a time.

That’s the origin story of Tiles.  And as you learn more about Windows 8 and how it relegates the existing Windows desktop to being just a single “tile” in the Metro universe, I think you’ll find Tiles as being the killer app. 

And don’t worry, Stardock plans to extend the Metro experience for users who are using Metro on their PC (i.e. we don’t want PC users to have to sacrifice usability so that others can use it as a tablet OS).

Stardock Tiles Beta

If you want to get access to the next Stardock Tiles beta, get Object Desktop. It’s our full suite of Windows experience enhancements.

At long last it is the weekend and as usual we end it with a roundup of the hottest skins and themes submitted to WinCustomize.com. 

Now for this weeks picks!

Hey everyone!  So much going on behind the scenes that it is getting crazy again.  Along with the actual skins themselves, we have had some interesting posts on WC along with great community involvement.  Check out the Object Desktop: Status Report 2011 here!

Now for this weeks picks!

Greetings! Long time no see!

So what’s going on with Object Desktop these days?  The answer: A lot. Much of what we’ve worked on for the past year hasn’t gotten communicated very well to our consumers and I apologize for that. 

As some of you may know, we sold Impulse to Gamestop last year.  A lot of people couldn’t believe that we would sell our most profitable business unit. But I suspect some of you will understand why.  It was consuming us.  In another year, Stardock would have been Impulse and little else.  And if money were the only purpose in life, maybe that would be a good thing.  But Stardockians want to make cool stuff, not put all our time into selling other people’s stuff no matter how cool it is.

This past year

That isn’t to say we haven’t been able to release some really cool stuff in the past couple of years.  Fences was recently regarded as the “best. program. ever.” by CNET. WindowFX 4, DeskScapes 3 upped the ante and while not part of Object Desktop, ObjectDock 2 came out this past year. And there have been updates to WindowBlinds, SkinStudio, IconPackager and Theme Manager in recent times to keep building on their success.

The cost of compatibility

At this stage in the development of desktop enhancements, we have to make some tough choices.  The #1 slow down to our development cycles has been trying to get things to run on Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Vista 64, Windows 7, and Windows 7 64.  And we are already developing for Windows 8 as well which is, in itself, a pretty significant departure.

So on the one hand, customers want new stuff and lots of updates but on the other hand they want their OS supported and we just don’t have the manpower to do that.  Back in the Windows XP days, we could crank out a ton of cool stuff.  Now, we have to worry about whether certain system DLLs will be available on Windows 7 “Ultimate” vs. Windows 7 “Home” or whether they were taken out entirely after Windows Vista Business.  Desktop Enhancements: Fun times.

Of course, in the old days, I was around to keep everyone in the loop on this stuff. For a lot of our long-time customers, it’s not the slow down in new programs but the lack of communication. Hence, the hidden cost of the focus on Impulse for the last couple of years.

Where we are now

So let’s talk about what’s happening NOW

Tiles

Our most radical new program is called Tiles. There’s an early beta of it on Object Desktop right now. It’s designed to enable users to manage their tasks in “pages” of tiles that represent what they’re currently working on or will be working on.

In the old days, we made virtual desktops. That made sense when we were all running on individual, low resolution monitors.  But today and into the future, high resolution, multiple monitor setups are how power users work and what they need are things that let them make full use of that.  That is the purpose of Tiles.

Carousel

In a similar vein, we’re working on a new program that will let you more effectively switch between running tasks via your keyboard.  Microsoft and Apple have each tried their hand with this but we have felt they spent too much effort in making it demo well versus being a practical tool.  And let’s face it, Alt-Tab is starting to get pretty long in the tooth.

WindowFX 5

WindowFX 4 was a significant departure from the old “special effects” concept of WindowFX.  That was because on Windows Vista, all those cool DWM effects were not hardware accelerated (Microsoft wasn’t hardware accelerating a lot of things in Windows Vista and had deprecated GDI+ and at first had removed hardware acceleration).  But in more recent times, hardware acceleration has returned, particularly in Windows 7’s DWM.  This has meant we can start adding lots of cool effects.

DeskScapes 4

DeskScapes is continuing to evolve as we prepare for the day of letting pretty much everyone make their own dynamic content for it.  The idea is to make it so that the desktop background isn’t limited to being pretty but can be made into a useful area.

WindowBlinds / SkinStudio

There’s not a lot to tell (publicly anyway) as a lot of work involved with Windows 8 that we can’t discuss.

Fences

There’s been screenshots of Fences 2 floating around. We have no ETAs on it yet as seeing what is (and isn’t) doable on Windows 8 is taking up some time.  But there’s a lot of interesting new features in the works including letting users define a directory as a Fence as well as having Fence “pages”.

IconPackager

We’ve had a hard time with Windows 7 folders and we’re not sure if this is going to be cured in Windows 8.  If it’s not, we may make changing the default folders of Windows 7/Windows 8 become a “hidden” (i.e. off by default, unsupported) feature.

Program X

Not so much a secret but rather we haven’t come up with a name for it yet. It’s a program for skinning the new Windows 8 immersion UI.

Program Y

Same thing, not secret but a program that takes some of the non “FX” parts of WindowFX and graduates them to their own program.

DesktopX

I don’t have a lot of good news to report on this.  The effort in making it work well on all these versions of Windows is not going well at all.  We are still deciding its future.

Theme Manager

Theme Manager 4 has become our preferred method of applying suites.  We killed MyColors entirely.  So over the coming months you’ll see a lot of of the MyColors themes become Theme Manager .suite files.

CursorFX 3

We are looking at updating CursorFX to support the DWM but it is still in the planning stages as we’re not sure the demand vs. cost of this yet.

SoundPackager 2

This is more an area where we need to bring in more developers.  We’re hiring btw.   If you’re a great developer you can even work from remote.

Tweak 8

Just waiting for Windows 8…

Legacy Programs

Some… a lot of programs are not going to make the cut.  One decision we have made is that if we can’t make it work on Windows 8, it’s dead. That doesn’t mean we won’t still have it available but we won’t be doing updates for it anymore.  Another decision is that we will be ending support for Windows XP pretty soon. We haven’t decided a date but what it means is that after that date, we won’t be testing on Windows XP anymore on new releases. So a program may work…or it may not.  The same is true with Windows Vista.  It’s absolutely murdering us trying to support all these OSes.

So let’s look at the programs that won’t be getting love:

RightClick, TweakVista, Virtual Desktops, LogonStudio, BootSkin, MyColors, ObjectBar, Keyboard LaunchPad.  They’re still available but we won’t be supporting or updating them.

GUI Championships

There will be a GUI Championships in 2012

WinCustomize 2012

There will be a revamp to WinCustomize 2012.  It will be more evolutionary than revolutionary. The main area will be performance and new features rather than a whole new look or something.

So that’s where we’re at.