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.

Long Zheng (istartedsomething.com) has created a Windows Vista UI "taskforce" which will gather and record all known UI quirks in Windows Vista.  Obviously, nothing can be guaranteed to be fixed, but Long will send the list to someone at Microsoft and hopefully get some results. He is asking for help in finding these quirks and there is already quite a big list of some interesting glitches in the Vista UI.  These are also fixes that could lead themselves into "Windows 7" as well.

Head over to his site and check out the current list, and if you know of something that should be there, go ahead and submit it.  You can also help out by spreading the word about the UI "taskforce" on your blog or social network.

Link: Window UI Taskforce

Update: Long Zheng has created a special website dedicated to the submission of any UI suggestions.

For years, PC makers have competed with one another largely on price. PCs, it was said, were nothing more than a commodity. But over the past couple of years, consumers have begun to take the overall experience a lot more seriously.

Last year's successful launch of the Apple iPhone made clear to cell phone makers that yes, the experience a "commodity" provides for the customer matters.  PC makers have begun to take note and leading the way is Dell who began pre-loading the new Dell Dock on consumer PCs yesterday.

The new dock, represents a significant improvement for Windows Vista users over the default experience by seamlessly integrating programs and data into the desktop experience. It's a first step to be sure but it's a pretty bold move for one of the world's leading PC producers to take. 

While at a glance, one might try to argue that the dock looks like the MacOS X dock. But that would be akin to people saying that the dock in MacOS X is like the LaunchPad that came with IBM OS/2. What makes the Dell dock special is its ease of customization, low memory foot print, and raw performance. In addition, as pretty as the Dell Dock is, its focus is on usability rather than flash. Short-cuts get separated from folders, the category view is designed for ease of access, and dozens of small touches make it feel as if it were a natural part of Windows.

Developed by Stardock's ObjectDock team, the Dell Dock is not based on the ObjectDock code but rather a brand-new Stardock technology platform designed to deliver exquisite performance while being incredibly efficient with system resources.

"We've spent years learning how to integrate new technology into Microsoft Windows to improve the user experience," said Kirk Windisch, Director of Stardock Software. "Now the focus is how to deliver this improved experience to consumers with enterprise-level robustness with a minimum use of system resources."

The Dell Dock is expected to be launched on over 11 million PCs this year. For PC users, it is a first step to a brave new world where the PC makers themselves are taking the Windows experience more and more seriously. Dell has clearly made giving their consumer customers a better experience a priority.

Have you ever been writing that important report for your boss and suddenly, Word just "unexpectedly" stopped working?  Or maybe the spreadsheet you have been working on for weeks gives you that strange corrupt file error?  Regardless of the reasons, I'm sure it's safe to say all of us have had some type of similar experience regarding losing important data. 

Backing up data is always one of the first things people tell you to do, but lets face it, many of us just forget or don't make a steady routine of it.  So what do people like us, or anyone for that matter, do to ensure our data is kept safe and can be easily restored if needed?

First thing you need to do is grab yourself a copy of KeepSafe.  KeepSafe is an application from Stardock that provides real-time backup of your data, and provides an easy to use interface for managing and restoring your saved data.  You can choose to backup specific document types, or entire folders, and KeepSafe will only backup when the files are changed, saving disk space.

Once installed, KeepSafe will present you with a wizard for a quick and easy setup of commonly used files.  You can always select more, and have access to more options in the full configuration window.

The main configuration window is where you can add and configure more file types, and also specify directories for backup.  It's not just for backing up document and spreadsheet files, you can select it to save nearly anything including media files.

One new feature in KeepSafe 2.0 is the ability to set a secondary backup location to an external hard drive or USB drive.  save to local storage temporarily and copy to secondary drive when connected.  There are also many different configuration options that lets you choose how often, or specify a backup size, allowing you to save even more space if needed.

If you are one who likes to keep tabs on what is being saved, and how much space it's taking, then don't worry as KeepSafe also has an easy to read Statistics section.  This section gives a variety of options to view all your KeepSafe statistics.

In the event that you do lose some of your data, getting it back is what really counts.  Another new feature in KeepSafe 2.0 is newly designed user interface of the recovery wizard.  This makes recovering any of your lost data a snap.  You can search through saved filed by time, file type, name, and more.  Once you find your file you then have the option to open or save it.

KeepSafe works with both Windows Vista and XP.  A free trial is available and you can find more information at the Keepsafe website.

Link: KeepSafe 2.0

I read a news announcement about a new freeware program that does some cool stuff. I check it out and it is vastly superior to an existing freeware program. Yet when I read the comments, the new, superior freeware program is being flamed. Why? Because the guy making it also offers a for-pay version that has more features.

I check out the forums of a game I enjoy playing. Normally people are singing the praises of this game. Now, the forum is full of flaming and angst. Why? Because the developer started offering optional premium content for players if they want.

Let me tell those complainers a truth about life: Money is exchanged for goods and services.

Before the current generation of l33t-speaking complainers became the norm on the net, we had a concept called shareware. Someone would make something cool and offer a version of it to try. This version might time out or it might have fewer features or it might just work on the honor system. If users liked it, they bought it. End of story.

Nowadays, we have it better. People make free stuff and release it. No nags. No missing features when compared to other "free" competitors. No time outs. But the developers will also release an even better version. And the complainers get vocal.

What annoys me is that the whiners are attempting to bully people from making stuff that many people like me want.  I don't live with my mom in her basement. I don't begrudge paying a few dollars to someone who made something I want.  I recognize that I already pay $80 a month for my cell phone and $60 a month for cable so bitching about paying $9 to $20 for something I want is pretty ridiculous. 

And I certainly recognize that the mere existence of premium stuff doesn't hurt me. If I want it, I'll pay for it. If I don't, I won't.

Let me give you two examples:

The program ObjectDock is the best dock out there. We make it so I'm biased but it has far more features than any dock out there. It's also free. You want a cool dock on Windows, this is what you get. But there is also ObjectDock Plus. It's $20 but adds a ton of features like tabbed docks. And so what do people say? They'll say that ObjectDock is "payware" or "crippleware".  Why? Because a non-free improved version exists.

Similarly, I love Team Fortress 2. It is a great game. And you know what? If Valve created a new character I could play as for say $10 I'd buy it in an instant. I want more characters in TF2 to play as. But you know the reaction they'd get. They'd probably get flamed because the parasite-class would argue that they should get that for free because buying something once to them means that the developers are perpetual slaves to them after.

I understand that we all want to keep from getting nickled and dimed but one assumes that we can make our own judgments as to whether something is worth it or not and allow others to make the same judgment.

Impulse is in the home stretch.

So what's going on at Stardock these days?  The answer is, LOTS of stuff. Where should I start?

I guess first, you're going to notice that we're going to start branding things to simplify what part of the company you're working with:

1. My Games. For Stardock's million+ gamers.
2. My Desktop. For the millions of people who use Stardock's desktop experience software.
3. My Tools. For the growing user base of next-generation utility software programs.
4. My Community. For users of Stardock sites like WinCustomize.com or JoeUser.com.

General Projects

The biggest internal project right now is Impulse.  It is designed to finally pool together all of Stardock's content, software, games, and other strengths into a single package.  For the past couple of years, we've had a program called Stardock Central which was really just designed as a quick and easy way to digitally distribute our own stuff. But we see the future as being a place where people can buy software, games, and other digital content from us as well. We have this immense infrastructure in place to do digital distribution that seems very popular with users. With our TotalGaming.net service, we've dabbled with distributing third-party stuff.  Impulse takes us to the next step.

The goal with Impulse is to let users and producers get together and easily purchase and manage their software, games and other content.

Impulse will go into a preview beta probably next week.

My Games

Stardock currently has the #1 game at retail, Sins of a Solar Empire.  Stardock's growing reputation as a top-tier PC game developer and publisher is something we're very proud of.  Developed by Ironclad, Sins of a Solar Empire is a space based RTS. Stardock was intimately involved in the design and development of this game, far more so than is typical in a developer/publisher relationship. We think that this approach is what has helped make the game the top rated PC game of 2008 so far and the best selling PC game right now.

Stardock does not plan to significantly increase the # of PC game titles it publishes. It will only publish titles that it feels it can give the amount of attention to that will ensure that when people see a game with the Stardock label on it that the user knows it is a great game.

Stardock's also working on The Political Machine 2008. This game is going to be sweet.  We did a version in 2004 which we cranked out in literally 6 months from scratch.  But with The Political Machine 2008, we were able to use the new 3D strategy game engine we've developed for the fantasy strategy game we're working on and the results have been phenomenal. All the candidates are bobble heads and the player designs them from scratch.

Given the interest from retailers, I will be surprised if The Political Machine 2008 isn't one of the top 20 or so best selling PC titles of 2008. Maybe next time we'll be able to get our act together to release a console version at the same time.

In addition to The Political Machine being an outstanding game, it's going to come with an outstanding website. I've not seen anyone try to do a social networking site on politics before. If you want to check out the beta site, go here. It's still on a test server (slow) and we're not yet satisfied with the look of it but you get an idea.

And of course, we can't forget about Galactic Civilizations II: Twilight of the Arnor. The expansion pack is in the final stages of development.

The fantasy strategy game we're working on will be announced as soon as we have enough time to get enough "assets" together to show off what we're doing.  Stay tuned on that.

My Desktop

Stardock's main desktop product is called Object Desktop.  We have two other programs in addition that are popular called CursorFX and ObjectDock but Object Desktop is Stardock's most popular product.

We sell the individual programs of Object Desktop which are immensely popular in their own right.  The three most popular Object Desktop programs are WindowBlinds (which can change the look of the Windows graphical user interface), IconPackager (which can change all the icons on Windows) and DesktopX (which can extend Windows to more natively support gadgets and widgets than other implementations).

Since its release, Object Desktop has been, by far, the dominating piece of software for power users to customize Windows. We're the Electronic Arts of digital customization. And I mean that both in the good sense and the bad sense (i.e. we get beat up by users who think our software is "bloated" or "buggy" or whatever).  It's a multi-million dollar market to be sure.  We have more users on our desktop enhancement software than we do on our games by far. A lot of the controversy comes from power users who actually aren't power users who really shouldn't be tweaking their computer in the first place.

MyColors

And so for the past year and a half, we've been working on a customization package designed for the mainstream: MyColors.  MyColors is a package that lets people pick a theme, press a button, have have their desktop change.

We just released MyColors 2008 which even takes care of updating itself and the themes. We've had some growing pains with getting the authentification of serial numbers nailed down and some people have had problems downloading but the last of those issues should be gone in the next couple of days. It's just an immense project involving so many different parts of the company that it took a bit of time to get everyone on the same page.

There's hundreds of MyColors themes available though with more coming on the way. The NBA themes are almost done and we've got a series of inspirational themes in the works. A lot of time is being spent getting classic content updated to Windows Vista and released as MyColors themes. 

Most of the major OEMs have expressed an interest in bundling MyColors on their systems with some of them already committed to doing so later this year.

DeskScapes

There's a ton of work on various desktop items including DeskScapes, which is our animated wallpaper program on Windows Vista. But we still have quite a bit of work to do in stability before this is ready for prime time. We'll likely be doing an open beta in the near future to help nail down this program.

Other Goodies

Object Desktop users got a sneak peek at IconDeveloper 2. It's a program designed to make it easier for people to take images and turn them into good looking desktop icons. Version 2 supports the new Windows Vista icon format and is a complete rewrite.  WindowBlinds 6.1 is in development and supports glass explorer backgrounds and other cool stuff.  Once we get Object Desktop 2008 out the door, we want to start concentrating more on 64-bit Vista support which right now is spotty.

My Tools

Our long-term project with ThinkDesk has been a real challenge for us.  Multiplicity and KeepSafe have continued to evolve.  TweakVista has been a big hit with 1.1 getting a very positive response. As much as we want Microsoft to improve Windows Vista, it is proving to be a good business for us to make software to fix it.  We're planning to eventually add TweakVista to ThinKDesk (our suite of tools) even though ThinkDesk is in a perpetual beta.

KeepSafe 2.0 is being worked on. You can check  out its updated UI here:

My Community

This month we re-launched the all new JoeUser.com.  This is the free blogging community we've built. We plan to aggressively add more social networking features into it shortly to allow bloggers to better organize their friends lists and interact with other people.  We're not intending JoeUser to compete with a Facebook or MySpace.  Rather, we want to be able to gather together people who like to socially interact online in terms of writing and let them work together -- as a community.

And lastly, WinCustomize.com, our most popular website, has seen its traffic grow and grow this past year.  Its due to get a major bit of work later this year based on the new JoeUser technology.

Since 1999, Stardock has been a pioneer in digital distribution.  The original Galactic Civilizations was the first PC game to be released at retail and digitally at the same time.  Its flag-ship product, Object Desktop, made the transition from being a retail product to being digitally distributed with a subscription in 1999.

For the past few years, Stardock has distributed its content with Stardock Central:

Stardock Central

And while Stardock Central was very cutting edge when it was launched back in 2003, it's getting a bit long in the tooth.  For the past year, Stardock has been working on a  new platform that will finally combine Stardock's various technological assets into a single place. This new platform is called Impulse.

Impulse

Impulse isn't just a cosmetic make-over of Stardock Central. It greatly expands the capabilities of Stardock's digital distribution offerings. 

Here are 5 key differentiators of Impulse:

1. Users do not have to load Impulse to use the software or games.
2. Impulse will support third-parties submitting their software or game, name their price, and then after review having it available -- all done nearly automatically. Stardock already has this system in place on WinCustomize.com with "Master" themes.
3. Impulse will integrate its next-generation social networking features in the Community tab that will let users have friends, chat about games, have blogs, and more.
4. Impulse includes built in support for backing up your purchase to CD/DVD.
5. Impulse allows users who buy software or games at retail to still manage their updates and re-download the entire product on Impulse (for products that support this feature).

Impulse provides a cleaner UI than Stardock Central.

Managing your software on Impulse is a snap. If you bought a game or software program at retail or even from another digital distributor, you may be able to still manage updates and such on Impulse.

Impulse is still in internal beta at Stardock but it expects to release it in mid February with additional features for it being added through the course of the year.

Believe it or not this is not another "Vista sucks" rant. Sure, my experience with Vista, so far, has not been perfect but not to that point. I am, so far, actually quite pleased with Vista. I have had a couple of issues with some games that won't work but I'm sure I will find a version that does. It just a matter of doing the research online.

So, down to business. This is my baby, an HP Pavillion dv9740us. Here are the specs;

PC Wizard 2008 Version 1.82

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Owner: *****

Organization: Hewlett-Packard

User: *****

Operating System: Windows Vista (TM) Home Premium Home Edition 6.00.6000

Report Date: Tuesday 29 January 2008 at 18:45

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<<< System Summary >>>

> Mainboard : Quanta 30CB

> Chipset : Intel GM965

> Processor : Intel Core 2 Duo Mobile T5500 @ 1666 MHz

> Physical Memory : 3072 MB

> Video Card : Nvidia Corp GeForce 8600M GS

> Hard Disk : TOSHIBA (160 GB)

> Hard Disk : TOSHIBA (160 GB)

> DVD-Rom Drive : Optiarc BD ROM BC-5500A ATA Device (this baby plays Bluray)

> Monitor Type : LGPhilipsLCD - 17 inches

> Network Card : Intel Corporation Wireless WiFi Link 4965AGN

> Network Card : Realtek Semiconductor RTL8168/8111 PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet NIC

> Operating System : Windows Vista (TM) Home Premium Home Edition 6.00.6000

> DirectX : Version 10.00

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I don't know about you but I think that's a pretty sweet setup. I have waited 10 years to get myself a laptop and I figured I get a decent one. As you can see it has Windows Vista Home Premium. While I would have preferred Ultimate, I'm ok with this for now. So far my experience with Vista has been pretty good. A few game problems as I have mentioned but nothing I can't eventually solve. I do, however, hate that constant screen that comes up everytime I install or run a program asking permission to run it. I can understand the security point of it, but this is ridiculous. Microsoft really killed it here.

The large screen is awesome; everything looks great including movies and games. Considering how much I was gonna pay for a 15.4 inch Dell XPS with similar components, I got a great deal and saved on shipping time and price. At first I was unable to play a bluray movie I bought; I had to update the Quickplay feature this HP PC came with in order to play the Bluray disk. It's similar to the Windows Media Center and I like it somewhat. I can listen to my MP3's, watch DVD's and other movie formats, I can listen to local FM stations, internet stations and it even came with a TV Tuner card and a nice remote control so I can watch TV anywhere.

I bought myself a copy of Call of Duty 4 and, while this still being a laptop it does lag from time to time but works great none the less. It's a great game though it's very short. I beat it in 2 days. I figure it was more designed for the online experience than anything else. So far most of my programs have worked flawlessly so I think Vista is a keeper. My wife is also happy; she got herself her own laptop, a n HP dv9000 series like mine, just not as powerful and with a few less features.

I'm a happy camper. This Pc will keep me busy for a while. What do you fellas think?