As discussed yesterday, I’ve retaken the reigns on Object Desktop after a 3 year absence.  And the team has some very cool stuff that is now coming together in rapid fashion.

Today I’m going to talk about something that I think is a pretty big deal: DeskScapes 3.

For those of you not familiar with DeskScapes, it is a program that applies animated wallpaper. It’s effectively the only animated wallpaper program available for users of XP, Vista, and Windows 7. 

One of the first changes I wanted to see made to DeskScapes as part of the “new regime” is for it to be a lot more practical.  I like animated wallpaper as much as the next person, which means I’ll load it up for a bit, check it out, and slowly get tired of it like any wallpaper.  But what we really wanted to see with DeskScapes 3 is for it to be even more useful to a wider population.

DeskScapes 3 (v2.91 beta) will be going out tomorrow for Object Desktop users.  What’s in it that’s new?

Well the most obvious new thing is the support for your existing static wallpapers. But more importantly, that you can now apply the same kinds of effects to your existing wallpapers that you could once only apply to Dreams. 

In the above example, I’ve taken a very colorful image and applied a Sepia filter to it in order to make (for me) a better background.

The new DeskScapes beta also introduces a pretty big new technology that has been discussed previously but now we’ve actually finally got it together: Hybrid Dreams

The idea is to make it so that people can take an existing image (a static one) and animate a part of it. So in this case, only the trees and the lights and some sky elements change and it’s very subtle. But because it’s such a small part, it uses virtually no CPU.  The idea is to be able to make it so that animated wallpapers need not be obnoxious but merely a natural evolution beyond the static pictures we’ve had for the past two decades.

If you don’t have Object Desktop you can get it at http://www.objectdesktop.com.  The final version of DeskScapes is due out on October 28th.

A couple of months ago we wrote about the announcement of the Dell Inspirion Mini Nickelodeon Edition which features skins and wallpapers created by Stardock!  These Mini’s are now shipping and they have a great lineup of options, and prices start at a low $329.

Features include:

• Slime left its mark on both the outside cover and inside palm rest.
• Explore Nickelodeon^TM  interactive features full of creative content.
• The world is just a click away with mobile connectivity¹.
• Watch your child’s media come to life on the 10.1" display.
• Add an optional external DVD drive to watch or burn CDs and DVDs

This would definitely be a great gift for the upcoming holiday season.  For more information visit the Dell Mini Nick Edition site below.

Dell Mini Nickelodeon Edition

Organize your desktop icons by creating fences and moving your icons into them.

Double Click on the desktop and it will hide your desktop icons, double click again and they come back.

If you put your mouse over a particular fence (like Temp Junk) you can see all the other things in that fence that were hidden.

I have been getting quite a few e-mails lately about how to get the latest WindowBlinds beta, among any other betas we are running at any given time.  It’s pretty simple to get the betas downloaded and installed, but if you don’t see them in your list in Impulse, you just have to make a slight configuration adjustment.

Here’s how.

Click the blue button, and that will open up the Impulse preferences.  Now just check the box that says “show pre-release versions”.  After that you should see any available betas.

www.impulsedriven.com

A new update for the DeskScapes 3 beta has been released today.  DeskScapes is an application that lets you have animated wallpapers on your Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7 (DS3 beta only).  There are hundreds of animated wallpapers, also called .dreams, available for download on sites such as WinCustomize.com.

The current beta of DeskScapes 3 is available for download if you have an active Object Desktop subscription, and is available through Impulse.

The latest update includes:

• Dream effects – Apply effects to .dreams allows you to change the way they look with cool looking filters
• Hybrid Dream Support – A Hybrid Dream is a new type of .dream that mixes static and animated images, which use significantly less resources
• DreamMaker with Hybrid Support

It’s a roaring Friday and we have another stack of sweet deals on Impulse this weekend.  While I have your attention, remember that time is running out to get into this phase of the Elemental: War of Magic beta by pre-ordering.  Get in before the end of September or you will have to wait until the next beta opening.

Now lets check out this weekends deals!

	Project Aftermath for 50% off - $4.99
	Fairy Tales – Three Heroes for just $19.99
	East India Company is 50% off - $19.99
	Capitalism II is 50% off - $6.99
	Age of Booty is 50% off - $4.99
	Scrapland for just $6.99

Check out the current sales we have going on in Impulse.

http://www.impulsedriven.com/explore/onsale

I came across the XP .msstyle convertor tool today, and I was very curious of what an XP visual style would look like on Windows 7 after conversion to a WindowBlinds theme.  To my surprise, it actually looks pretty good.

A little work needs to be done in SkinStudio, but overall the conversion worked pretty well.  I’d like to know the interest in wanting to use old XP themes on Windows 7.

Today we are happy to announce an update to the WindowBlinds 7 Beta.  The WindowBlinds 7 beta is currently available for active subscribers to Object Desktop , and can be downloaded via Stardock’s Impulse. 

New in this update:

1. XP toolbar & animations settings are back in the UI. They are under Settings now
2. On Vista the sidebar skin settings are back in the UI. Also under Settings.
3. Explorer backgrounds tab has been added to the UI. This will show on XP, Vista AND Windows 7.
4. New Textures tab added to the UI.
5. Support for enlarged menus on Vista / 7
6. Some additional skin sections added for Vista / 7 including new shadow sections.
7. The fixes for the start button clipping on multiple monitor Win7 boxes are in this build.
8. The old WB UI has a bigger button for the new UI and says Beta 2 rather than Beta 1.
9. You can drag wallpapers to the large preview area and it will copy them into the wallpapers folder off WB skins as it used to in WB6. Note that its the large preview area and NOT the list itself.

It’s time once again to wrap up this week, and as is customary we will kick the weekend off with another round of Impulse Weekend Buys!  Aside from these specific deals, I would also recommend checking out the newly released on Impulse, Civilization IV series.  Don’t forget to check out Majesty 2 which was just released this week.

Now for the Impulse Weekend Buys!

	Pre-order Tropico 3 for just $32.50 – 10% off
	Scavenger is 50% off - $4.99
	Droplitz is 50% off - $4.99
	Aztaka on sale for $14.95

Stardock is excited to announce the release of the fourth phase of its popular digital download platform, Impulse .

Impulse enables users to quickly purchase, download, install and update any of thousands of available games, applications, and utilities to their machine. Once purchased, the program becomes associated with their account. If a user purchases a new PC or reformats an existing PC, a user can install Impulse, log in with their account and instantly re-download all their programs.

In the year since its initial release, Impulse has garnered widespread support from major game and application publishers. Most new PC games, for example, are now released on Impulse and a growing number of application developers are releasing their titles on Impulse as well.

“The objective of Impulse is to make it so that your software truly belongs to you,” said Brad Wardell, president & CEO of Stardock . “Anyone who has ever dug through boxes of CDs or looked through old emails to find a serial number can recognize the advantages of Impulse.”

In addition, PC gamers will soon be able to make use of a new Impulse feature called “Ready to Play”, a revolutionary new free program that allows users to create instant virtual communities based on profiles in order to quickly get multiplayer games going with like-minded people.

“Imagine Match.com or eHarmony for PC gamers where users enter in their gaming preferences and some profile data and with that data, Ready to Play can recommend other gamers with similar gaming preferences. My idea of what is ‘fun’ in an online game is probably different from that of say a teenager,” said Wardell. “With Ready to Play, now you can quickly get games going with ‘recommended’ friends.”

Ready to Play will go into wide beta as part of the Impulse Phase IV roll-out this week. To learn more about Impulse visit www.impulsedriven.com .