First looking through the galleries I thought this was going to be a tough week, but as I moved along I actually had to add a couple of more entries than usual, just because there was a bunch of stuff I wanted to feature. 

Now for this weeks picks!

	Shifty DX in DesktopX Themes by J. PuterDudeJim Really cool theme that has the ability to change colors just by adjusting the sliders.  This is great as it will match a wide variety of desktops.
	Waves in Dreams by muckyman A nice mix of colors and motions for your desktop.  Very nice.
	League of Extraordinary Skinners for IconPackager by Asect This is the matching icon set for the LoES suite which can be found on Skinartistry.com.
	IRONMAN folder in ObjectDock Icons by Libardo I can't believe this was done using Photoshop.  What an incredible job this is.
	Xeno for RightClick by Nimbin I really like the dark design, and I have quite a few WB skins in mind that this would work great with.
	Aladdins Cave in Wallpapers by ahabkaba I really enjoy the style and creativity of these wallpapers.  They look good on such a variety of themes.
	Arance - Orange in Wallpapers by floina This is a very nice and refreshing wallpaper.  Perfect for those summer-inspired desktops.
	Calm Fields in Wallpapers by DEVJIT Another beautiful scene which looks great on the desktop.  I would like to see more resolutions though.
	Red Pearl for WindowBlinds by voidcore This is a very creative skin.  The start menu and title bar buttons are probably my favorite, but it's a superb skin all around.  Great job.
	Haven for WindowBlinds by Night Train The colors are fantastic!  This is an example of a skin that will be perfect for a summer desktop as well.  Doesn't matter, it's a great looking skin for any time of the year.

Congrats and great work to all the skinners who submitted works this week.  Check out the skinners personal pages for more of their works.  See you next week!

This is an excerpt from something I wrote for our internal business plan. I've had a number of people comment that they think I should publish this so here it is:

Why do people make what they make? If you ask someone, they will answer that it’s based on how good of a job they do or their level of training or perhaps because that’s the “going rate”. But none of those answers get to the root of why people make what they make.

How much people are paid is derived from how much wealth they produce. The typical amount of wealth produced by a particular job title helps set the base salary – i.e. the market forces that set the “going rate”.

But the reason why an engineer makes X and a secretary makes Y has to do with the wealth they produce. To make more money, you have to find ways to produce more wealth.
People are not compensated simply because they are good at their job. They are compensated for what they produce either directly or indirectly through their labor via others. It’s not about fairness or skill or personality. Those things may be elements that lead to opportunities to generate more wealth but they are, in themselves, not the root sources of their salary.

The greatest worker will still not be as well paid as a mediocre worker if the product of the great worker’s labor doesn’t make as much wealth as the mediocre worker’s efforts.
For example, the reason the CEO of Stardock works so many hours, brings his laptop on vacation and is available on it all the time isn’t out of a sense of duty or guilt. It is because the CEO of Stardock wants to make more money and does this by producing more wealth through his efforts.

No one forces or suggests that a particular employee should work every weekend or be available on his laptop while away on vacation. But at the same time, he should realize he is making a choice. Most people are unaware that they’ve made a choice. Most companies are too rigid to even allow for such a choice. But in the right company, the management team will make sure employees have as many choices as possible in order to harness their native abilities to generate more wealth.

Compensation isn’t about fairness or hard work. Compensation is the result of the wealth the individual has produced. That Wealth can be measured as the difference in wealth that would have been generated by an organization if that person wasn’t there versus how much was produced by his contribution.

The individual who believes they are entitled to wealth simply because they are surrounded by it is always doomed to disappointment because they do not understand that those who obtained the wealth are the ones who are entitled to it.

Compensation is not given as a prize or gift. It is not a fief given by the benevolent corporation. Compensation is simply the portion of the wealth that the individual already controlled. The individual already controlled that wealth because they were the ones who produced it and the corporation is reliant on the individual to continue to produce that wealth.

The money people earn was always their money even before it was paid to them. The employee always had control over that compensation because they generated it. Compensation is not dispensed as a bribe or as tribute. Compensation is merely the affirmation of the wealth that the individual already produced. It was already their money. Companies that do not turn over this money are stealing is just as much as a thief who breaks into someone’s home.

Companies do not give compensation because they are generous or fair. Companies provide compensation because they want those individuals to continue to generate the wealth that allows them to mutually benefit.
The greedy company that attempts to withhold the share of the wealth that rightfully belongs to the individual destroys itself because by withholding the earned wealth, the individual can take their productivity elsewhere.

However, if an organization can successfully argue that a given amount of wealth would have been generated whether a particular person was there or not, then that particular person has no sovereign claim to any of that wealth and to think otherwise will only lead to baseless resentment. A person only “deserves” the compensation that they control. And they only control it if they produced it through their labor or investment.

With Impulse finally here, it's time to start a new set of guides and walkthrough to make sure you are getting the most out of Impulse.  I thought I would start it off with going over the Community features, specifically the Friends feature.  I really like this as I can keep tabs with what my friends are doing and other activity.

When you hit the Community tab, you will see a list in the upper right hand corner which shows which of your current friends are online, and also shows you any pending friend requests.

Clicking 'manage' will take you the friends request screen where you can review the pending requests you have.  As you see in the screenshot below, I have three pending requests.  From here you can choose to accept the friend request or just ignore it. 

That's the basics of managing your friend requests, so now lets move on to how to actually request someone to be a friend.  I noticed one person wasn't on my list, so I headed over to Bebi Bulma's profile and blog.  In the upper right hand section you should see a link to add a friend, so just click that and a friend request will be sent. 

You also have the opportunity to send a note with that request as well.

One you have all your friends organized, you can click the 'Friends' tab at the bottom of the Community section.  This will give you an overview of your friends activity.  It will show you who your friends are making friends with, and also show you comments and blog posts they have made.  It's a fantastic way to keep up to date on what your friends are doing.

You can also see a more detailed list about your friends, including links to their blog and profile by selecting the 'Friends list' or 'Dashboard'.  You will also have the ability to remove friends from here also if you wish. 

After reading this guide you should have a good understand of how to request and manage your friends with Impulse.  If you don't have Impulse yet, head over to www.impulsedriven.com and get your copy.

Stardock’s new Impulse digital distribution platform has been recognized by Microsoft as having met the stringent testing criteria and been awarded the right to display the Certified for Windows Vista logo.

Impulse, which was formally released by Stardock on June 17th, 2008, is a cohesive, integrated virtual platform for consumers and developers that has been designed to simplify buying, supporting, and developing PC games and software applications. Through Impulse, consumers can purchase, download and install games, utilities and even video drivers, enhancing the Windows experience.

“Microsoft is pleased that Stardock has earned the Certified for Windows Vista software logo for their Impulse application,” said Jeff Price, senior director in Windows Client Product Management at Microsoft Corp. “This highlights Stardock’s commitment to providing its customers with higher quality applications that deliver a more secure, reliable and compatible experience with Windows Vista.”

Applications that receive this recognition have been independently tested to assure the highest levels of compatibility, functionality and reliability and must meet both Microsoft's own security guidelines and the privacy standards set for by the Anti-Spyware coalition.

Phil Madis, Director of Business Development at Stardock, added, “We are pleased to have been awarded the highest level of Vista compatibility certification by Microsoft. By undergoing and passing the rigorous testing process, we are able to assure our customers that Impulse has been optimized for ease of use, optimal performance and to take advantage of the enhanced security features of Windows Vista.”

It should be noted that Impulse supports both Windows Vista and Windows XP. Impulse was developed using Microsoft’s .NET technology.

Impulse is the greatest thing since sliced bread...yada yada yada.

But how good is it really? Ultimately, only you will be able to decide.  What I'm going to do here is give my personal opinion on how Impulse stands on the eve of its launch.

The Comparisons

Let's just get this out of the way, Impulse is not Steam or Direct2Drive or Xfire or whatever.  It's has a very different design philosophy.  So let me just say this: You would have to pry Steam out of my cold dead hands.  You should judge Impulse as how well it addresses your problems.

First Impressions

So I double click on the Impulse icon.  How fast does it load?  On my ThinkPad T60 it's about 5 seconds but YMMV.  In its phase 2 edition (August) I think we need to make it more multithreaded so that when you launch it, it comes up like a window. I.e. instantly.  But it is pretty snappy (a lot faster for me than the betas were).

My next question would be, how much RAM is this thing using?

On load up, about 15 megabytes which is pretty good given that Internet Explorer uses 84 megabytes! 

The Store

From a digital e-commerce point of view, the million dollar question is, how good is the selection in the Impulse store?  With Steam or Direct2Drive, I can get a gazillion different games.  So what about Impulse? The answer depends on what you're looking for. 

The first week of the Impulse launch will be spent handling the logistics of getting hundreds of gigabytes of games, utilities, and applications up on the servers. So what is available at say 1pm on the day of the launch will be different from what is available at 5pm of the same day with each day adding more and more stuff.

But by Christmas, I suspect it won't be selection that makes one choose one digital store over another but rather the features and services that these things provide.  Impulse, for instance, supports refunds for users having technical issues. That's a pretty big deal IMO. As far as I know, that will be unique to Impulse.

Community Features

So that we're all on the same page, Impulse isn't just a download manager ala Stardock Central.  It is a full blown digital distribution platform.  The platform comes in the form of Impulse Reactor which is a server-side virtual API set for developers.

A developer could, for instance, using the free Impulse Reactor SDK (which will be launched in mid August) type into their game: CVP.SaveGame() and save their game to the player's virtual drive.  Or CVP.LoadPreferences() to get a game's preferences.

The first game to make use of the Common Virtual Platform will be The Political Machine.  Unfortunately, The Political Machine v1.1 wasn't ready by the Impulse launch so we had to hide the "Games" button from the community area for multiplayer match making.  As soon as it's ready, the button will come back and players will be able to find games either there or within The Political Machine itself.  Other games that will be using it include Sins of a Solar Empire, Galactic Civilizations II v2.0, and Demigod.  We are also working with a number of third party developers to begin using this.

Blogging

I am very biased in favor of non-website whenever possible. I just find website stuff slow. 

The blogging and forum behavior on Impulse is pretty fast but I'd like to see it much faster.  As in, instantaneous.

I think in the coming weeks you'll see a lot of improvements to performance across the whole thing as the initial launch was largely about just getting stuff in there.

My Friends

The friends stuff is a pretty big deal for me as both a user and as a gamer.  It's only in its beginning stages really.  Eventually, you'll be able to easily get games going and filter by friends or friends of friends to help improve the multiplayer experience.

When I play on-line, my biggest gripe is the griefing and such I run into.  I'm 36 years old, I just don't have time to waste in a multiplayer game with some 15 year old whose out to "max their ranking".

Features that didn't make to the launch that make me sad

There are 3 big features that had to be put into phase 2 (August) that make me sad. The Impulse side was done but we just didn't have enough time on the game side to make use of them yet.

Those are:

1. Multiplayer Matchmaking.  People could start and join games right from Impulse.
2. Achievements.
3. Game Rankings.

They'll get in there, we just have to update The Political Machine and other games to make use of them so that we can show off what's possible to game developers.

The same is true for NAT negotiation and such.  One of the biggest pains in the butt on the PC is getting ports and firewalls set up right for a game. In Impulse phase 3, the Impulse back end will be set up to act as a kind of back-up for games that use our platform.  So a user could connect to another user without knowing anything about routers and what not.  We're hoping Demigod will be the first game to make use of this.

Getting Updates

So right now, there's a tab called "Updates" that shows up if there are updates to ones programs.  I'd like to see an option put in asap that simply has Impulse download these updates automatically.

My other request is that when downloading updates, I want to see my actual bandwidth speed. I realize this is cosmetic but somewhere, techies should be able to get some idea of how fast their connections are.

Getting to my stuff

Impulse lets users add new categories to  their applications and move things around via the dock (we'll talk about that more soon).

If there's an update, an exclamation point shows up next to it.

What's not in the launch version are forums for every application or a chat channel. Eventually everything will get its own forum and chat channel.

Registering your stuff

Users can associate various programs with their account.  Right now, the only commercial programs that you can associate with your account are Stardock ones and programs you bought from Impulse. But the next step is to let you be able to associate any program with your account regardless of where you purchased it.

This way, when are setting up a new machine, you can just let Impulse download and install all your stuff (freeware, shareware, games, whatever).

Preferences

Clicking on the orb in the top left opens up additional options.  You can set up where things install on a per category basis:

The Dock

Impulse is designed to customizeable.  The initial launch doesn't have the skinning selection features in. That's coming "real soon now(TM)". But you can add and edit your own categories:

 
Extending Impulse

When you press the minimize to dock, Impulse launches the dock:

Impulse Dock

The dock displays the same content as the Impulse client. By default, it is set to auto-hide so it will hide to the taskbar edge with the user able to bring it up by moving their mouse to the bottom edge of the screen.

The dock is pretty powerful and yet light weight.

We plan to release later on an Impulse Tray applet that users can optionally use to stay in touch with friends, posts, updates, etc.  It will not be part of Impulse itself as it will be designed to be as tiny as possible. 

So what's next?

I think most people will find Impulse pretty compelling. Initially, its game content is not on par with Steam or Direct2Drive but that should change over time.  Obviously on the non-game software side, it enjoys a tremendous advantage. 

Impulse itself is pretty snappy but I found the forums and blog services be a bit on the slow side. This will be something Stardock will need to improve.

Download speeds of new programs, by contrast are fast. Faster than anything I've ever used anywhere.

The customization features, while decent, could be a lot better. I.e. I'd like to be able to select from a list of skins.  Stardock's the leader in this area so it's something that it will be adding and supporting through its skinning site, WinCustomize.com.

It will be important that Impulse show off the features of Impulse Reactor as quickly as possible.  Getting the Multiplayer matchmaking in should be up by the end of the month.  Achievements, rankings, etc. are all going to be crucial as well.

I'd like to be able to filter out programs that are available but not installed. I'm an extreme case since I have a ton of things linked to my account but still.

I think people will be pleasantly surprised at how fast and memory efficient the overall program is.  Given how pretty it is, on might expect it to be slow and a memory hog but even in its first release, it's really snappy.

You probably know that WindowBlinds is the best way to change the visual style for Windows Vista and XP, but did  you also know it can also help you manage your wallpaper collection as well?  Yep, WindowBlinds 6 has it's own wallpaper manage built right in.  It's had this feature for a while, but with the new UI layout in WindowBlinds 6, things look just a bit different than in previous versions.

Lets take a walk through the wallpaper section in WindowBlinds 6, and let me show you how you can use it to make the process of managing your wallpapers a little easier.

As seen in the screenshot above, the wallpaper tab in WindowBlinds will present two other tabs.  We will start off in the "Change my wallpaper" tab, which should be the default selection.  There are two different views for the wallpaper area, one with a preview section and one without.  Which you use is a matter of your preference, but you can easily switch between them by clicking the button seen in the screenshot below.

By default, you should see wallpapers from the Windows directory, WindowBlinds directory, and others in the wallpaper section.  Bring up the wallpaper settings window by clicking the tool icon.

This will bring up a dialog where you can add and delete folders which contain images that you would like to use as wallpapers.  The drop-down menu is where you can set the images to tile, stretch, center, or use the smart mode.

Changing the wallpaper is easy.  Once you have selected the image you want, just double-click the image and your wallpaper will change to that image.  If you want to mix it up a bit, move over to the "Random wallpaper settings" tab.  Here you can set the wallpaper to change at certain times and actions.

• Change the wallpaper every time you logon
• Change the wallpaper on a Monday morning.
• Change the wallpaper every hour
• Change the wallpaper every morning

Just use the drop-down menu to select which setting to use.  To select the images to use in the random settings, just double-click the wallpaper image and a check will appear by images that will be used. 

Now you see how easy it is to manage and change your wallpapers using WindowBlinds 6.  For more information visit the WindowBlinds website at www.windowblinds.net.

Impulse doesn't care where you got the programs, you can keep them side by side.

Minimizing Impulse to the Impulse dock I can quickly access all my stuff.

Impulse's community features are extremely advanced. Friends lists (which work back and forth with games), blogs, tracking, user ranking, etc.

My Friends list. Also coming soon: Facebook integration.

Live chat features about your favorite games, apps, or whatever else.

Impulse is a digital distribution platform. But its store also supports sending users a boxed version too (for participating publishers).

The Next Generation Digital Platform

Creating a digital platform for both PC games and applications

“Impulse is the most user friendly and versatile platform we've used to date, and it’s clear that there's nothing else quite like it.” -- Bartosz Kijanka, vice president of engineering at Gas Powered Games (developers of Dungeon Siege, Supreme Commander, and Demigod).

A Quick Primer on Stardock

Stardock is the developer of Impulse, a next-generation digital platform for Windows. However, for people to take the Impulse platform seriously, it’s important to relay some of the history of Stardock.

Below are three key points about Stardock:

1) Stardock has been delivering digital distribution networks for a decade. The first PC game to be released both via digital distribution and at retail simultaneously was Galactic Civilizations in 2003.

2) Stardock is the “go-to” company for creating solutions that integrate into Windows as if they were a native part of the OS. For example, if you’ve recently bought a Dell computer, it probably came with Stardock’s software pre-loaded. Similarly, Stardock was the company tapped by Microsoft to deliver the default animated desktop wallpaper and user solutions for Windows Vista. Other customers include Gateway, Alienware, HP, and many others.

3) Stardock is one of the top PC game publishers and developers. Its latest PC game, Sins of a Solar Empire, was in the top 10 best selling games at retail for several months – despite most of its revenue coming through digital sales.

Introduction

It’s hard to believe that only a few years ago there were those who didn’t think people would embrace the idea of purchasing and downloading software digitally. Yet, embrace they have, and today few doubt that digital distribution is the future. Even more than that, few doubt that digital platforms are the future. Google, Microsoft, and others are working ceaselessly to create their own digital platforms that users and developers can make use of.

Stardock has become well known in the last couple of years thanks in-part to its popular PC games, such as Galactic Civilizations II and Sins of a Solar Empire. However, the company is also well known for its common sense approach to copy protection – its retail games have none and yet still sell hundreds of thousands of copies.

On June 17th, Stardock will introduce a next-generation digital platform called Impulse.

What is Impulse?

Impulse is the solution to a basic problem on the PC: The fragmentation of the market has made developing, buying, and supporting software increasingly difficult; Impulse addresses these issues and more.

Here is a sample of the issues Impulse is designed to solve:

1) A user gets a new PC or re-builds an existing one. Today, that user is forced to dig through CDs and serial numbers to reload their games, utilities, applications, and other programs. With Impulse, the user types in their UserID and Password, and all the titles associated with it (even if they didn’t buy the title via Impulse) are automatically downloaded and installed.

2) A user buys a new game and wants to play it online against others. Getting multiplayer working on the PC is a pain; even if a user does get it to work, it can be difficult to find a game. Even after setting up a game, there’s no universal way of tracking scores, rankings, and achievements. Impulse resolves all these issues and more.

3) The PC market has consolidated so much that it is very difficult for a new developer to get their program or game out there. Impulse will soon provide a utility called MyImpulse that will allow developers to submit their program or game to Impulse, name a price, agree to a standardized, automated agreement and then be able to try it out via Impulse (only on their account). Once approved, their title is available.

Impulse is a platform first and has been designed to be useful to the user even if they never purchase anything from Impulse. It is designed to be useful to developers even if the user didn’t buy their game from Impulse and doesn’t have Impulse installed.

5 Reasons Why Impulse Matters

1) It has the content. Impulse will have many of the major PC game publishers signed on by its launch, as well as several major PC software publishers. Many other publishers are slated to sign on after the Impulse launch as well.

2) Impulse adheres to Stardock’s well known stance against obnoxious copy protection. Impulse is designed to work seamlessly whether connected to the Internet or not.

3) Impulse doesn’t minimize to a system tray icon, instead, users can minimize it to a dock similar to what is in Stardock’s ObjectDock. In other words, it’s useful even for those who haven’t purchased anything on Impulse.

4) Impulse delivers a virtual PC platform called Impulse Reactor. This platform provides APIs that allow developers to easily make use of Impulse’s considerable back-end capabilities such as virtual storage, multiplayer matchmaking, multi-game multiplayer game finder, friends lists, virtual saved games, virtual storage, player achievements, device driver updating and more.

5) MyImpulse - a special publishing application - will enable third-party developers to submit their games or software for sale on Impulse. Developers will be able to name a price and other details of their product, then submit it to Stardock for approval. With this nearly automated process, it will lower the barrier to entry for new third-party developers to sell their software.

Of course, those are just some major points, here’s several others:

· Impulse supports localized currencies. Are you in Australia, Germany, or Russia? Would you like to buy programs in your native currency? Impulse can do it.

· Per Territory distribution. Are you a publisher who only has the rights to distribute a game in Italy but want to be able to sell your game to only people living in Italy? No problem, Impulse can do it and go one step further by only showing those customers living in the authorized territories your products.

· Impulse supports custom Impulse stores for different Impulse distributors. Are you a retailer or PC OEM who has their own specific agreements on selling certain games and applications at different (better) pricing? Impulse has you covered here as well.

· Impulse can be distributed by anyone. Do you have a website, blog, magazine or a retail store? Impulse can be custom branded and distributed by you with the distributor getting 15% of the gross revenue of all purchases made by a user who created their Impulse account from your distributed client. Put Impulse up on your website and when someone downloads it and creates an account, that user is forever affiliated with you. Hence, three years from now, when the user buys Unreal Tournament or Supreme Commander 2 or Office package X, you get 15% paid to you on that purchase.

· Impulse supports refunds. Buy a game or application and it doesn’t work on your system? Thanks to Impulse’s SSD (Secure Software Delivery) technology, Stardock can refund users and simply remove the item from their account (after the user uninstalls it, which sends a message to the server that it is gone). Impulse takes the risk out of digital distribution.

A Guided Tour of Impulse

Impulse is still in beta and many of the features are not available in the preview. This tour is designed to give users an idea of what will be available on June 17^th.

The Impulse Dock

Everyone wants to be a platform, it’s the new buzzword. However, there needs to be something basic that makes one thing a platform and another thing not a platform. For us, it’s simple: If a user wouldn’t use it unless they purchased a program from it, then it’s not a digital platform.

“Impulse will succeed not because it forces users to use it but because users will want to use it.” –Brad Wardell, President & CEO, Stardock Corp.

Impulse has been designed such that even if a user never buys anything from the Impulse store, they would still want to use it. The first element of the “want to use it” mantra is the Impulse dock. Rather than minimizing to yet another system tray item, users can minimize it to be a dock on the desktop. From this dock, users can add as many programs and folders as they would like. When an Impulse supported program is updated, it gets flagged on the dock. Items on the dock also show up in Impulse as well – any program can be added to Impulse itself as well as the dock. Coming from Stardock, it’s not surprising that it’s all skinnable and integrates seamlessly into Windows.

Your Stuff

Load up Impulse and once logged on, you can download or update any of the programs associated with your account.

Figure 1: Your stuff

You don’t have to necessarily have purchased the program from the Impulse store to update and download it. If it’s a Stardock program, it doesn’t matter where you bought it. You could have purchased Galactic Civilizations I back in 2003 in Germany and still use Impulse to download the full complete latest/greatest version.

Stardock is also working with publishers to support this for their titles, so that no matter where you bought your game or application, you’ll be able to download and update it on Impulse – for free.

The Store

The Impulse Store makes purchasing and downloading games, utilities, applications, anti-virus, etc. a snap. The goal of the store is to make the purchasing experience look and feel as much like a native part of Windows as possible (this is still a work in progress).

The Impulse store is being designed such that users can quickly find out whether a given program is worth their while by visiting the title’s forums, going to the chat channel for it, reading comments on it, etc.

Figure 2: Picking a favorite publisher is extremely easy. The store interface in Impulse is unlike anything seen before. Clean and simple.

The Community

In the “good old days” there was Usenet, which provided a standardized way for people to find out about virtually any topic. In a web-centric world, there is no longer a standardized way to find out about a given program or genre. Impulse aims to solve this issue.

Figure 3: Impulse supports built in blogging, discussion groups on virtually any topic, chat, and more.

The Impulse Community is both incredibly powerful and easy to use. Any Impulse user can set up a blog and add their friends who have Impulse accounts. (Again, the manta “You don’t have to buy anything to find Impulse useful” – anyone can create an Impulse account.)

If users want, Impulse lets you see what discussions your friends are participating on, what games they’ve recently played, what blogs they’ve recently written, and much more. In addition, Impulse allows users to find multiplayer games to join in, chat about virtually topic live, update video drivers, and much more.

“When a new title is released, it can be difficult to find people to play in multiplayer,” said Craig Fraser, Ironclad Games. “With Impulse, reaching critical mass will be much easier as players can browse through all their games at once. As an added bonus it will display games started by people who didn't buy the game from Impulse so it's not a partial list.”

Impulse Reactor: A virtual platform for users and developers

Impulse Reactor is the underlying platform that Impulse makes use of. What makes Impulse Reactor so important (and differentiates it) is that its functionality comes from the Impulse server farm and not from the client. Impulse is a thin client designed to be fast, memory efficient, and easy to use. The real magic of Impulse takes place on the Impulse Reactor.

Impulse Reactor could be described as a series of API (programming calls) that developers can use in their software. The calls do not know or care whether the user has Impulse installed or not, it only requires that the user have an Impulse account (which is free) so that the user can be identified.

To use them, a developer only needs to download the Impulse Reactor SDK (which is free). The SDK will be available in late August.

Impulse Reactor is the result of the combined efforts of Stardock, Gas Powered Games, and Ironclad Games.

Here are some of the features of Impulse Reactor:

· Common Virtual Platform (CVP). Developers can add a series of calls to their games that make it much easier to implement multiplayer and easier for players to find multiplayer games. For example, one line of code - CVP.FindMatch() - can query the Impulse Reactor for a game that matches the included parameters, return the game info and launch the game. A few other calls include:

o CVP.Join() (joining a multiplayer game). CMP supports NAT negotiation so that opening ports and messing around with configuring your router will soon be a thing of the past.

o CVP.AddAchievement() adds an achievement to a player’s account.

o CVP.FindFriend() finds a particular friend to play with.

· Common Virtual Drive (CVD). Developers will be able to write data out to a virtual hard drive on the net. From here, developers can do everything from saving games, providing virtual keyboard and preference saving, to saving files. The virtual drives won’t be very large (10 megabytes per application) but more than large enough for supporting crucial data for applications and even saving data files.

Example: CVP.SaveFile() or CVP.LoadFile().

· Common Community Network (CCN). Developers will be able to write applications that can query information from the Impulse community infrastructure. Hence, help files, user support, or anything else that a developer can imagine wanting from their application can be obtained and integrated into their program.

To repeat the mantra: You are not forced to install Impulse to benefit from this.

“Our architecture is very open. We’re not interested in trying to force people to use Impulse. The reality is, these are things that should be part of the OS but because of the overzealous DOJ, Microsoft has been prevented from doing this kind of thing.” –Brad Wardel, President & CEO of Stardock.

In addition, this has been designed to be extremely easy for developers to implement.

Impulse: The Technology

Impulse is a Microsoft .NET based technology from the client to the server infrastructure. This helps ensure future compatibility and increases performance as .NET gets more and more integrated into Windows.

The Future…

Impulse is being launched in three phases:

Phase 1: The initial launch on June 17^th to coincide with the release of The Political Machine 2008 (www.politicalmachine.com) will have the features described in the guided tour. It will have several major and minor PC game publishers and developers on-board for the launch along with several major and minor PC software developers.

Phase 2: In late August, the second phase of Impulse will be released along with the SDK for the Impulse Reactor. Additional major publishers and developers will be announced and released, along with Achievement and Game Rankings functionality. A large number of unannounced features will be announced as well.

Phase 3: Early in February 2009, Phase 3 will launch with Demigod. Yet more titles will be available and MyImpulse will be officially launched (beta will be publicly available for months before hand). More info to come on this as we get closer.

Conclusions

Most PC users can agree that the Windows experience needs to be improved. It’s too hard to manage purchases, too difficult to set up games and applications, and too much work to get a decent gaming experience. It’s also too labor intensive to setup a new PC.

Impulse is the result of a decade of experience in building digital networks for PC users. It takes Stardock’s knowledge in both digital distribution and its enterprise development background to create a universal, virtual digital platform for the Windows PC.

“Stardock has been breaking ground in online distribution and online user community space for a very long time, and Impulse is a clear reflection of that expertise.”-- Bartosz Kijanka, vice president of engineering at Gas Powered Games.

Was it just me, or was this a very long week?  Lots of goodies again this week, and although I have said this many times, I hope the momentum keeps going for most of the summer. 

Now for this weeks picks!

Go through all the galleries and post some of the skins you really liked from this past week.  There are always such a wide variety out there that I like to see what else the community is liking.  See you next week!

For many of you, this video might not show anything new, but for new users this demo video gives you a highlight of the main features of WindowBlinds 6.  If you know someone who wants to change their desktop, you might send them the link to this video.