The holiday season is here again, and it’s time for the 2008 Holiday Gift Guide.  One of the great things about Impulse is the ability to purchase gifts for other people, and they will be able to download them without having to wait for a package to arrive through the mail.

Day 3 we are going to go right into desktop enhancements, most of which will be applications to help you customize and organize your desktop.

WindowBlinds 6

There is no better way to change the complete look and feel of Windows, than with WindowBlinds.  WindowBlinds 6 brings a ton of new features and performance enhancements that makes this perfect for anyone who wants to get away from Windows default look.  Whether it’s wild or mild, there are skins to fit just about every personality.

 

Link: WindowBlinds 6 ($19.95)

IconPackager 4

If you want to change the entire set of Windows icons, or each individually, IconPackager 4 will make any geek happy.  There are hundreds of icon packages available on sites like WinCustomize.com that are available to download and use with IconPackager.  Many icon packs are made to match a particular WindowBlinds skin, and many are just completely new designs that look great with any theme.

Link: IconPackager 4 ($19.95)

Object Desktop/Object Desktop Ultimate

Object Desktop is a suite of desktop enhancements, which include both WindowBlinds and IconPackager.  Both Object Desktop and Object Desktop Ultimate contain the same core applications, the Ultimate upgrade adds additional applications such as SoundPackager, TweakVista, IconDeveloper, and more.  Object Desktop 2009 was recently released, so now is a perfect time to get started.

Link: Object Desktop ($49.95)

Link: Object Desktop Ultimate ($69.95)

ObjectDock Plus

ObjectDock is the best when it comes to an application which can help you organize your desktop with an animated and fully functional dock.  ObjectDock Plus adds the ability to have multiple docks, tabbed docks,  system tray support, and more.  View a demo video here.

Link: ObjectDock Plus ($19.95)

A couple weeks ago I asked people to nominate Frogboy for the third annual Edge Game Industry Heroes Award (EGIHA). It is given to 25 people in the industry worldwide that engender respect for the profession and demonstrated superior ability in achieving lasting tangible positive results throughout the year. They are seen as a catalyst of success and inspire confidence and admiration within their peer group and others.

I like to think of the EGIHA as an a combined Olympic & Oscar award for the gaming industry. There is no particular order of rank however. The named recipients are simply considered the best and the brightest the industry had to offer for the given year by the Edge editorial board. I think this is a very nice well deserved honor for Brad and his maverick activities for nearly two decades in establishing and building SD and crafting its alliances within the industry.

Moreover it is also a great testament to team SD as well as team IC for all their hard work this past year. After all a leader is nothing without a solid team of people around him/her and it appears SD & IC have it in spades. This is especially so given the company surrounding Brad on the list. Consequently I say it makes the SD family the biggest little guys out there.

If you ever worry about losing your data from a corrupted document, or from a power outage, KeepSafe is the ideal solution for real-time data backup.  KeepSafe has an easy to use interface and setup wizard, which will get your data protected in no time.  You can select which types of documents to backup, and there are a wide variety of options for maintaining those backups.

To see a more detailed review, check out one of my walkthroughs.

• Keep Your Data Safe with KeepSafe 2.0

KeepSafe is normally $30, but Stardock has a special holiday promotion going on where you can get KeepSafe for just $8.95. 

Use coupon code KEEPSAFE-2008 at checkout.

Link: KeepSafe

Several months have gone by already in the 2008 GUI Championships, and today we get the honor of announcing the final winners in this competition.  This years contest featured three categories….WindowBlinds (Visual Styles), Icon Packs, and .Dreams (Animated Wallpapers).  There were so many outstanding entries this year, but it’s time we focus on the final winners.

These participants will receive prizes from our valued prize sponsors such as AMD, TechSmith, Corel, Stardock, DeviantART, WinCustomize, and Wacom!

Link: GUI Champs ‘08 Final Winners

The holiday season is here again, and it’s time for the 2008 Holiday Gift Guide.  One of the great things about Impulse is the ability to purchase gifts for other people, and they will be able to download them without having to wait for a package to arrive through the mail.

In Day 2 we will look at some of the useful tools and utilities you can find on Impulse.  Whether it’s tools to keep your PC maintained, or to make it more productive, there are  plenty of applications available to help.

Tool and Utilities

Multiplicity Pro

If you have two or more computers on your desk, then you need Multiplicity.  Multiplicity allows you to control multiple computers with one keyboard and mouse. 

It’s the ultimate in productivity, and it’s one of the tools I just can’t work without.

• Link: Multiplicity Pro

KeepSafe

KeepSafe offers users the ability to seamlessly offer a real-time backup of your files.  Anybody who works with important files would really appreciate this.

• Link: KeepSafe

System Mechanic

Over time temp files and other things will start to clutter up your PC, and you need a good and safe way to keep  it running like new.  System Mechanic has a wide variety of tools to do just that, and even defragment your drives, manage memory, remove malware, and much more.

• Link: System Mechanic

AVG Anti-Virus and Anti-Spyware

AVG is one of the best names out there when it comes to anti-virus, and this package also include anti-spyware  and anti-spam features also.  A firewall along with other tools gives you all the protection you should need.

• Link: AVG Anti-Virus

Genie Backup Manager Home 8

If you need a complete backup and recovery system, then look no further.  Genie Backup Manager Home 8 can  backup your data to a variety of media such as DVD’s, External Drives, online, and much more. 

• Link: Genie Backup Manager Home 8

The holiday season is here again, and it’s time for the 2008 Holiday Gift Guide.  One of the great things about Impulse is the ability to purchase gifts for other people, and they will be able to download them without having to wait for a package to arrive through the mail.

With Day 1, we are going to start off with MyColors themes.  MyColors allows you to change the complete look of your desktop with a new visual style, icons, wallpaper, and desktop gadgets with one easy to use interface.  There are tons of themes available including licensed themes from the NBA, NHL, Ford, Chevy, and more!  MyColors is a great gift as no other software is required to change your desktop, MyColors takes care of it all.

Sports fans

Know someone who loves basketball, hockey, or collegiate sports teams?  What could be a cooler gift then giving them the ability to put their favorite team right there on the desktop? 

• NBA Themes
• NHL Themes
• Collegiate Themes

You can browse all the team themes at the links above, but here are a few highlights.

Miami Heat	Detroit Red Wings	Texas A&M

Fun Themes

One of my personal favorite theme types is in the ‘fun’ category.  Here we have a variety of MyColors themes that are based on season, video games, and anything that is cool and fun.

These are a few examples, and more can be found here.

• MyColors Aquarium Desktop
• Pirate Desktop
• Princess Desktop
• Sins of a Solar Empire
• Sunny Day Desktop

Pirates	Sins of a Solar Empire

Rides

Another very popular themes category for MyColors is ‘Rides’.  MyColors has officially licensed themes for Camero, Corvette, Mustang, and Harley-Davidson.

Harley-Davidson	Corvette	Mustang

All of these MyColors themes are under $20, and make a perfect gift for anyone who spends time behind a computer screen.  Don’t forget, if you are a current Object Desktop subscriber, you get a discount off of MyColors themes!

Link: MyColors

While Electronic Arts dominated the top selling list with Spore and the Sims expansions, Stardock found itself with the 6^th best selling PC game title of the year despite the fact that the game has no copy protection whatsoever.  Stardock has been a long-time proponent of focusing on increasing sales by rewarding customers with free after release updates instead of using invasive DRM to fight piracy. 

Stardock’s Galactic Civilizations series began this trend with Ironclad’s Sins of a Solar Empire continuing it.  Sins of a Solar Empire recently saw a massive free update in the form of v1.1 this past November – 9 months after release and its first expansion pack, Entrenchment, just went into public beta.

Stardock’s next PC game, Demigod, developed by Gas Powered Games, has a March target  release date and will also include no on disk copy protection.

Source: http://pc.ign.com/articles/936/936933p2.html

Last week, AMD released an update to their Catalyst drivers, including enhancements that were added specifically for the benefit of DeskScapes users who are still running Windows XP. You should expect to see a dramatic drop in CPU usage especially for dynamic dreams.

We are encouraging all AMD card owners who are using DeskScapes to update their drivers. If you are still using Windows XP, this is a requirement.

The drivers are available for download from http://game.amd.com/us-en/drivers_catalyst.aspx or can be accessed directly via the Community tab from Impulse.

I talked about how much I enjoy using Paint Shop Pro from Corel, but they also make some other cool graphics applications as well.  Another one that comes to mind is Painter X.  The easiest way for me to describe Painter X is that it is a digital painting studio, with the ability to replicate traditional painting at incredible levels.

Painter has always been known to be the top solution for creating digital art, and Painter X improves on that with additions such as the RealBristle Painting System, new composition tools, enhanced photo painting tools, and much more.

While a tablet such as one from Wacom isn’t required, you will definitely get the best experience out of Painter X by using one.  I have been using it with a lower-end Wacom tablet, and I can just imagine what something like a Cintiq can do with it. 

If you need a simpler solution, Painter Essentials 4 is also available, and leans more toward everyday consumers than graphic artists.  But if you need or want total power when it comes to digital art, then there is nothing better than Painter X.

You can get more information about Corel Painter X here, and it’s also available for purchase on Impulse.

The 2008 GUI Championships is coming to a close with the voting for the Best Overall events happening right now, and the final winners to be announced this Friday (12/19)

The top prize in this year's contest is the ultimate tool for the digital artist; the Wacom Cintiq 12WX.  Wacom was extremely generous in donating one of these tablets as the top prize.  As with the Radeon HD 4850, I'm going to take some time to show off the tablet, as well as share some impressions from members of the Stardock Entertainment Art Team that use these tablets on a daily basis as they work on games such as Galactic Civilizations II, The Political Machine 2008 and the upcoming Elemental: War of Magic.

To start with, lets talk a little bit about the Cintiq, what it comes with and what it's designed to do.

The Wacom Cintiq 12WX belongs to the high-end line of digital graphics tablets from Wacom.  The major and most noticeable difference is of course that instead of drawing on the tablet with the digital pen and watching your monitor to see what's going on, the tablet itself is the monitor so the experience is closer to drawing on paper or painting on canvas.  The metaphor is more natural and easy to understand.

The 12WX is the "entry level" Cintiq, priced at nearly $1,000 USD and measures roughly 12" on the diagonal.  This is comparable to working on a small laptop, or drawing on piece of letter-sized paper (ok, it's a little bit smaller than that measuring 10.3" 6.4").

Here are the hardware specs:

• Dimensions: 16” x 10.5” x .67” (WxHxD)
• Weight: 3.6 pounds display only, 4.4 pounds with video controller
• Screen: 12.1” WXGA (1280x800)
• Display/Tablet Area: 10.3” x 6.4” (WxH)
• Display Input: VGA, DVI-D
• Number of Colors: 16.7 million
• Color Management: ICC profile, 6500K white point
• Tablet Pressure Sensitivity:1024 levels
• Data Rate: 200 pps
• Resolution: 5080 lpi
• Function Keys: 10, user assignable
• Touch Pads: 2, user assignable

Now that we've covered what the tablet is at a basic level, lets start poking around at it to see how it feels in practice and what the new user experience is like.

Setup

Setup of the tablet is relatively straight forward, though there are a lot of cables to plug in, and settings to configure. 

For the purposes of demoing the product, I hooked it up to my Dell Inspiron 6400 laptop running Windows Vista Business Edition (32bit).  This presented its own challenges in that Vista's management of tablet peripherals leaves something to be desired.

The Cintiq comes with everything you need to hook it up to your Mac or PC, including both DVI and VGA cables depending on your graphics card's output (the laptop is VGA, my desktop would have used the DVI).

Getting the tablet hooked up was pretty easy.  Connect control box to tablet, usb from box to laptop, video from box to laptop.  Done!  The only thing that tripped me up at all was the power switch.  It's hidden on the back edge at the top left of the tablet, and it blends in very well with the casing.

The setup on the PC was pretty straight forward too.  Follow the directions included with the software CD and you'll be fine.  Oh, and don't skip the tablet calibration step, even if you think you don't need it.  Without calibration, the tablet can not properly determine the position of your pen relative to the edge of the screen and will instead just move the cursor relative to its position, not the pen.  This means you'd have to find the cursor on the screen, put your pen there and then move it, otherwise things get wacky.  Calibration takes less than 30 seconds and transforms the experience from that of confusion and frustration to what it's supposed to be.  Trust me, I spent 15min struggling with this before I understood what I had messed up.

Use

My first suggestion is that you run the tablet as a mirrored display (in Windows Vista, this is done from the Mobility Center control panel, not display properties), this will avoid problems of losing your cursor to the primary display, where you can't control it from the tablet. While I was demoing the Cintiq, I used it as the primary display, shut my laptop completely and set the tablet up on top of it.  Either in that orientation, or holding it in my lap as I doodled were the most natural methods for me.

Once you have the tablet configured to your liking, you'll want to try out some drawing tools to see what it feels like in use.  Probably the single best-suited graphics tool for the Cintiq is Corel's PainterX.  This is a graphics app that's designed with a tablet in mind and it really shows.  There was no additional configuration required to make PainterX properly use the Cintiq, it even properly handled pressure sensitivity on the pen and the use of the eraser tip when flipping the pen over.

Even though I'm far from anything you'd consider an artist, I was able to quickly reproduce the same general quality of sketching I can do with a regular pen or pencil on paper.  There was virtually no delay in drawing, and the accuracy was terrific.  If I had any artistic talent, I can already see that this would be a natural and highly effective method to draw on the PC.  I now see why web cartoonists such as Scott Kurtz of PVP, and Gabe of Penny Arcade love these tablets so much.  They won't make you a better artist, but they will make the process of getting your drawings onto the PC infinitely easier and faster.

One non-graphics application that I found very useful with the Cintiq was Microsoft's OneNote tool.  A great combination if you're trying to quickly jot down notes for yourself when using the tablet.

So it's awesome for use with graphics tools, which is what it's designed for, but if you're going to use the tablet like I did as a stand-in for the primary display and close down the laptop, you'll want to keep an external mouse/keyboard hooked up for any non-drawing tasks.  Personally, I kept the laptop connected to my main desktop via Multiplicity so I just continued to use my main keyboard and mouse to control the laptop.  Despite the natural feel of drawing on the display, using the pen to hunt-and-peck on an on-screen keyboard or navigate menus just felt slow and uncomfortable.  But like I said, that's not what this is designed for, so it's an understandable and forgivable drawback.

Professional Views

Like I said, I am not an artist by any stretch of the imagination.  I'm a gadget geek who loves new toys and can appreciate great tech when I see it, but with something like the Cintiq, I just can't fully explore the potential on my own.  So I walked over to our art team to ask them what they think about the Cintiqs they have.  Several of them have the 12WX model and use it for much of their 2D work.

The art team here at Stardock has worked on several critically acclaimed PC Strategy games including: Galactic Civilizations II: Dread Lords (+Dark Avatar & Twilight of the Arnor expansion packs), The Political Machine (2004 & 2008) as well as the upcoming fantasy turn-based strategy game Elemental: War of Magic (2010). 

All in all, I love my 12” Wacom Cintiq tablet.  It’s got great sensitivity, accuracy, and it also has tools that allows you to adjust for the parallax between the screen surface and the cursor.  It has 10 programmable buttons and 2 touch strips, all of which can be customized to each of your favorite software packages.  As a game artist, I use Maya and Photoshop primarily.  So I can set up the left set of buttons for proper navigation in Maya, and reset those same buttons for navigation in Photoshop.

Of course the best thing about the Cintiq is the ability to draw directly on the screen.  I’ve used a normal Wacom tablet for the past few years, and for me there has always been a coordination issue of trying to draw to my right but having to look up and to the left.  With a Cintiq, I’ll never have to worry about that issue again.  It’s like having a never ending supply of sketchbooks and canvases.  I can either draw on paper then scan the image in and then color it using the Cintiq with Photoshop, or simply sketch directly on the Cintiq and go from sketch to finished painting.  I use it for concept art and texture painting, and it has increased my productivity by about 50 percent.  My only critique would be that I wish it was a bit brighter and a lot bigger!  Overall it’s an amazing piece of equipment for any digital artist. 

–Akil Dawkins
Art & Animation: Galactic Civilizations II: Dread Lords (2006), Galactic Civilizations II: Dark Avatar (2007), Galactic Civilizations II: Twilight of the Arnor (2008), Elemental: War of Magic (2010)

Another of our artists who uses the Cintiq heavily for day to day work is Leo Li, one of the newest members of the Stardock Art team…

I believe the Wacom Cintiq offers an incredible degree of control and precision for any graphic or illustrative artist. The ability to draw directly on-screen makes my productivity and efficiency at least three or four times faster when it comes to doing any sort of illustrative work in programs such as Photoshop and Illustrator. Aside from some slight color distortions when compared to the monitor, the Wacom Cintiq is virtually flawless in other departments such as features, usability, and control. I personally find it to be an invaluable tool for my daily activities as a digital illustrator.

-Leo Li
Art: Elemental: War of Magic (2010)

For its price tag and size, the Cintiq 12WX is a great entry point for digital artists looking to make the jump from their older tablets to something better.  It's easy to use, highly accurate, works well with pretty much all of the major graphics tools on the market and won't swallow up all of your free desk space.

The only downside reported from our art team?  Our Art Director, Paul Boyer, lamented the fact that Wacom hasn't made the jump to building a tablet PC for digital artists.  He'd love to see the power and accuracy of the Cintiqs glued straight onto a laptop so he could really use it just like a sketchbook, wherever he went.  The power of the Cintiq with the mobility of a laptop would be amazing indeed.