I have a confession. I've been cheating on WinCustomize. It was only supposed to be a temporary fling but it's turned into being a full blown affair.  What started out as being a small game project grew and grew until nearly everyone at the company has been on that instead of working over here.  You can see my writings over there on this page. It's like having a double life.  By day, making PC desktop extension software, by night, we make video games. It's crazy.  But things are starting to return to some level of normality.

The whole Galactic Civilizations II thing has been consuming us and on top of that, there's been a lot of internal work on the ThinkDesk programs (those of you in the beta, updates coming soon, we're just trying to test these things out).

I want to stress that Stardock is hiring. As long as you're willing to work in Michigan, send your resume to [email protected].  We're looking for developers, artists, quality assurance people, web developers, ASP.net developers, .NET develoers, support people, and many others. If you think you have a particular talent, put it in with your email and send it to her.  No experience required in many cases. Some of our best developers of all time were right out of high school. Others had 4 year degrees.  We don't care what a piece of paper says. We only care about what you can do. 

Last of people is literally what slows things down the most though.  Especially in QA.  We have builds for everything from LogonStudio 2 to Sound Packager to ObjectBar that end up going to an increasingly long queue of an over burdened QA team.  And it can't be done remotely.  And we can't just release this stuff either because even if people "reported" the problem, who is going to read the reports if there's not enough QA people?

Suffice to say, we're trying to hire as fast as we can.  FYI, Michigan has warm sunny weather all year round. Rumors to the contrary are malicious and false...

A great month in skinning

Meanwhile, proving that my presence on WinCustomize is what could be considered "optional", the great skinners have been quietly kicking butt this month. A few skins I've noticed this month that struck me as particularly cool include:

Aten	Nimbus II	HALO
Lozenge	Glossamer	ArtWork
Wire and Glass	Omega Point	Solaire-dark 2.1b
Mako	Pandora's Box	SD Organizer (2.04)
Camuflaje IP	ArtWork	CYY SkyLine

And this is by no means a complete list. As people have noticed, I've been gone a lot working on that galactic game.  So I don't have every new skin running yet on my machines. But there's been some great stuff.

Meanwhile, those of you who have Object Desktop should definitely check out the latest WindowFX's.  It's a pity we didn't get these betas out earlier. The QA backlog really bit us this time because a lot of the features that seem "Vista-like" were actually in there before they appeared (or that we even knew) they'd be in Vista.  (Some visual effects are simply obvious).  But of course, since there was the beta delay, some people are going to say it was just "copied" from Vista.   Of course, it bears pointing out that we're doing Windows Vista level effects on Windows XP.   In other words, there's some really cool stuff in there.

If I can get some more QA help, we can finally get ObjectBar 2 out the door along with Control Center 2.  QA has been the primary issue there.  If we had more IT resources, we'd set up easier to manage external beta teams but again, without someone to organize the reports, it's hard to act on them.  

The new Windows Vista build came out.  I think people who were all jazzed up for the Sidebar are going to not be so excited.  I don't know Microsoft's ultimate plans with the Sidebar but it is increasingly looking like it may just end up as another accessory.  The problem is the same problem all widget/gadget things have had -- a reason to exist.  Let me give you an example from a program I like -- Yahoo Widgets.  Yahoo has been featuring a 2006 Olympics widget during the olympics. There's a perfect use for a widget right? Something to keep you up to date with what's going on in the Winter olympics.  Total downloads? Less than 20,000 total and they count repeat downloads (WinCustomize does not count repeat downloads in its count). By comparison, Treetog's new skin, Mako, already has over 50,000 downloads. 2,000 of them today and it's just barely afternoon here and that's with no promotion, no front page coverage. Certainly no Yahoo.  

It's not that the widgets aren't a good idea or aren't that popular. It's that they are niche.  For people like me, who love this stuff, and thousands like me, widgets are sweet.  But it's going to be hard to have the Sidebar on by default just to satisfy people like me when they can put it into accessories where, again, people like me will find it, turn it on and run with it.    So we'll see how that works out.

Windows Vista is almost certianly going to usher a new era of skinning.  Right now, skinning is pretty much off limits to the increasing number of 3D artists out there.  But Vista is probably going to open the door to them. Stay tuned on that front.

So anyway, hope you found this informative.  More soon.