The question is really will animated wallpaper make the leap from the skinning world to the mainstream.

Vista will be the standard going forward for the near term.  XP computability is going to start to wane.  Hardware is going to become available so that memory and CPU usage won't matter to most folks.  I'll contend that most folks never know how much CPU or memory is being used.  Most people never come close to maxing out either. (in fact, I'd say that they never care until they get so many popups that their PC slows down too much to work  )

Sea Hourse makes a good point about content being a driver.  I disagree ON the content but that's neither here nor there.  I also disagree that matching with Windowblinds will have much impact of the success or failure.  Mainstream america won't ever change Aero.

Dreams as dreams aren't going to break into the mainstream on their own.  I still think the trick is going to be getting them bundled with other products.  Take my photo example from above.  If you could get Dell or someone to pre-install DeskScapes and have a photo slide-show dream that cycles through the allusers folder you've got a winner.  Now you just need a way so that NewDellUser can tell his Gatway friend that they can BUY this product . . there's another sale.

The impact of animated wallpaper will grow slowly over time and never be as ubiquitous as wallpapers because of the issues noted above unless there is a driving force to get them out in the public eye.

Customization, imo, will only grow and expand as PC's become more prevelant in society, I'm of the opinion that the reason it isn't more popular than it is, is lack of exposure and advertising. I do see it becoming more mainstream, not less. Animated wallpapers are a good step to opening up customization to more inquiring minds. It's one thing about Vista I am happy about. People will discover them on Vista, then search for more, up pops WC, ergo, more people are exposed to WB and other areas of customization.   

Personally I don't care much about what wallpaper I am using since it is covered most of the time when using the PC anyway, but I am probably in the minority there. I do like it to match the WB in some respect though. I don't know if I would use animated wallpapers more but since I'm not on Vista I can't try that out. I surely would give it a try but as with screensavers I might decide it is just unnecessary.

I was a old user of the shareware DreamRender program but found that I had too many problems with the application conflicting with other programs and that the quality of the "Dreams" varied even more than the quality of WindowBlinds. Even worse, every time I reformatted my harddisk (which I normally do a few times each year) I discovered that I would have to re-register my copy of DreamRender. The idea of an active desktop sounds good, but I'm wondering if it's anything more than additional eye candy for the average user.

The same can be said for almost any desktop customization.

I can't wait for the beta of Deskscapes 2 to show up in Stardock Central. Any word on when the beta will be available for Object Desktop users?

It needs to be a cross platform application or it won't survive. I do not plan on upgrading to Vista because it's not worth the money, period. I'd love to have an animated wallpaper, as well as animated icons. I like to see my desktop dance but not at the expense of buying an OS that has failed to be even a substantial upgrade from XP.

Until Dreams is a cross platform deal, then it's "no deal" in the long run.

I disagree.  XP is going to die in the long run.  Vista and the next OS (Windows7) is the future.  At some point XP, within the next few years, is going to become "feature-poor" and most people will be "forced" to upgrade hardware and software.

In the near term. DesktopX and IconX are your friends.  There are a few DX themes that are "dream-like" (check out the first two here)

I'm sorry but that's an insane opinion.

You seriously think people will be sticking with Windows XP forever?  That's like the people who argued that if we didn't support Windows 2000 that a given program or feature was doomed. Now how sillly does that sound today?

Eventually, virtually everyone will be running Windows Vista or whatever comes after it.  It's just a matter of time.  These same pronouncements were made when Windows XP came out -- lots of people claiming they would never move to it.

Is it really that insane? Wallpaper is a mainstream feature because everyone has access to it. While I hardly believe that everyone will be running XP forever, there just is no reason for the average Joe to upgrade to Vista. Many people may just choose to skip it like ME, it's too early to say one way or the other. Another possiblity is that you may see more of a shift to some linux flavor or mac, it seems a pretty good number of casual users are buying macs these days. If I had to recommend a computer to a non-savy friend or relative it just might be a mac.

At this stage, as things currently are it's hard to imagine Dreams becoming anywhere near as mainstream as static wallpaper anytime in the next 5 years or so. The casual market just doesn't move that fast. I imagine it will take half that time just for Vista to get some level of market saturation. After those 5 years in order for it to succeed a lot of things need to happen. Cross-platform or at least cross OS version support is pretty important. At least at that time Microsoft should have a new OS out that would hopefully mean you would have at least 2 OSs on the market that support Dreams. Still users need to be able to easily create their own content, now you just take a picture with your digital camera and BAM! new wallpaper. Maybe not wallpaper good enough for hard core enthusiast customizers but good enough for most people. This will be a very important factor as it also affects the amount of content available to everyone, which in turn impacts the popularity as well. I think most content creators start off with very simple means like taking a photo and then start to dabble. With a vertical learning curve you will see much lower acceptance, as the learning curve becomes very flat then maybe you will start seeing broader acceptance, more content and then in turn a shift to the mainstream. The question is how soon do you see these things happening?

I think most of us put our own wallpaper on the desktop partly because we think our pictures look better than the stock wallpaper, but mostly to mark it as "my PC". An animated wallpaper is most likely going to be someone else's as it takes more graphics skills to produce a pretty looping movie. The other obvious thing is that many of us don't spend a heck of a lot of time with an empty desktop. My two screens at home are almost always mostly covered with applications, and the same at work. Maybe when I can afford a 30" widescreen there'll be more "free space", but I think I'll still want to see my holiday snaps in the background, not wavy scenes. My take is that animated wallpapers do have a place, but it's more as a novelty with a bit of "cool factor" - till the novelty wears off. Quite different to the wonderful SoundSpectrum visualisations which I run in screensaver mode every day. At work people coming to talk to me are transfixed by them. Now they are cool, long term.

On the issue of variation of CPU usage between Dreams.  This is a big deal for a lot of people and I understand why.  You don't necessarily want your CPU to be running at 50% utilization or greater, especially if you need those resources quickly for some other task.  If you're a poweruser, you want to be able to call on the majority of your system resources at a moment's notice.

But the resource utilization of a Dream is a function of the content, not the software powering it.  Video dreams vary in utilization based on various factors:

• Resolution
• Framerate
• Compression
• Format
• System hardware

People are still feeling their way around the idea of video as a desktop backdrop.  Right not you're seeing a lot of people experimenting with the visual design elements such as composition, looping, color and image selection etc.  After nearly a full year we're starting to see a lot more consistency in available content.  It's getting better.  In the next 6-12 months, my guess is that content creators will, having nailed down their visual style, move on to making their Dreams not only look good, but run better than ever before.  It's the natural evolution of any new visual tech.  Get it looking cool, then get it running well.

And as Vista slowly becomes the dominant Windows OS (my guess is 2 years and we'll see it around the 80% mark, we're already at roughly 20% here on WinCustomize) we'll see Dreams become a major component in the customization landscape, and there's a lot going on with things like MyColors that will help open this area up to more and more users.  Animated Wallpapers have a very interesting ride ahead of them in the next few years.  It's a completely new market so to speak.  The folks building content for these now will become the masters of the medium in a few years.  Just look at how fondly people look back on the early WindowBlinds skins and the early skinners.  Dreams are a new frontier for artists to make their mark on.

I really like the idea of dreams and used them to a bit on a 30 day Ultimate trial but the only ones worth using were the stardock design ones because they usually used only 10-15% CPU.
Most user generated ones ran at least 30% some at 60% which is just a joke.
I think .dreams could become very sucessful but only if they use minimum system resources.
Personally i think backwards compatibility with XP is pointless for exactly the reason frogboy points out, Although i personally still have some real hassles with vista on a day to day basis I'm sure SP1 will fix them all.
All in all i think Dreams are a good thing, perhaps with more features like triggers depending what you do with your computer, intergrated with OD and WB, I really think OD needs a bigger feature set to really drag it into the 21K, animated 3D icons, full mac style app control from the dock.

The point being: People aren't going to stick with XP forever. Therefore, your earlier argument fails: "Until Dreams is a cross platform deal, then it's "no deal" in the long run."

 

 

Excuse my ignorance, but is it possible for something to make Dreams to work in XP?

From what I gather, Vista finally has the engine behind it that can play animated wallpaper without an significant hit to performance.

DX can be used to do some animated wallpapers and there are third party apps that can do it in XP but most slowed my PC down too much to be usable.

Brad, any thoughts about my comments about content driving mainstream acceptance?

Well you replied to my comment, but the "No Deal" quote belongs to Rich. I personally think more hinges on ease of content creation. That said Vista adoption is slow and many will skip it. Note that when I said cross-platform, I'm including cross-version. That means you might see more wide spread use once the next Windows is out(Windows 7?), but right now Vista is the only player. Many people will skip Vista, much like what happened with Windows ME. I'm not saying it will never hit the mainstream, but it definitely won't in the short term and whether or not it will in the long term depends on a great many things that need to happen first. Having more than one platform support it sure wouldn't hurt.

In reply to Leo the Lion,
Yes it is possible, the better question would be is it feasible. You would have to build the engine from scratch, and compatibility with various video cards would no doubt cause issues. The question as to whether or not it is feasible both from a technical and business perspective would be better left to the engineers at Stardock. However since it doesn't appear that they are planning it my guess would be that it probably isn't feasible.

i would love to have animated wallpapers in the future on my pc, and I truly think that they will be one aspect of future skinning......i even believe that one day a wb will have touch screen features.......(too scary??) and I agree with frogboy, of course xp will die and fade.......its just like windows 95, 98 ect..... the future means we go forward, not looking back, and with technology the way it is.....well, its only going to go forward...  

xp; which took a while for myself to accept, then to promote as friends would request a new custom built state of the art hardware box with a dinosaur OS (WinME) which could not provide drivers for the SOA hardware, is doomed. I have already experienced this 1st hand as i tried to mod my new box with a triple boot, vista premium, vector linux and xp pro. with vista preinstalled, xp killed my vista boot and when installed could not drive my mobile nVidia graffix; so it's a moot point, xp is already a dinosaur. vista sux but so did xp in many ways, linux rox but if i didn't boot up in windows every now and then, i wouldn't need stardock. Soooooo, long live vista! eh?  

Twas 12 days before Christmas and still waiting Stardock



That is most for sure. Forward we will go.