I miss summer.  I mean I really miss summer.  I didn't spend enough of it outside. But with Summer over, at least there's October. I like October because of Halloween. And in Michigan, which is where I live and work, the leaves are coming down. 

October is traditionally the start of "Skin season".  I don't know what that is. But ever since I got into skinning, October seems to be the first month where the number of cool new skins really starts to spike.  Maybe it's because people are starting to go back indoors and they unleash their creative energies.  This October has been a great time for skinning.

For example, Pixtudio is back and stronger than ever.  Alexandrie of Pixtudio releaed Noire, one of the best skins I've ever seen. Seriously. You should use this. On the same day, rising star JJ Ying released Azenis. It's a dark skin and while most dark skins are not terribly useful, Azenis is quite usable and looks fantastic.  These two skins show off the international nature of skinning -- Alexandrie is from Canada, her partner at Pixtudio, Treetog, is from Brazil, and JJ Ying is from China.  It just goes to show when we humans are working together regardless of location amazing things are possible.

Speaking of international skinning, danilloOc from Brazil released a slick little suite this month called Anion.  Pixtudio also released a very complete called Rusty Rooster. I can't remember so much cool stuff coming out in a single month since maybe the last GUI Olympics.  As I walk around the office of Stardock I have seen a lot more "new" stuff than I've seen in quite a long time.

I mean look at these icons:

They're incredible! It's just been a good month and then of course we had the big news: WindowBlinds 5 finally went into beta.  It's hard to believe that WindowBlinds 4 came out almost 3 years ago.  It's only available on Object Desktop right now but we hope the final version will be out before the end of the year.  The biggest new feature is that it can do per-pixel alpha blending on nearly all of its controls including title bars, menus, and the Start bar.   There have already been some very cool skins that have come out that take advantage of it:

StealthOS

Arrow

Rusty Rooster WB5

Azenis_SE

BlindSpot

Thunder Storm WB

Dream Land

Caprice

And that's just in the past week or two.  Now, per pixel alpha blending doesn't just mean having skins that are glassy or semi-transparent.  It can be used to have smoother looking skins. There are many types of skins in the past that simply couldn't be done because they'd look very "jaggy".  For instance, title bars that are irregularly shaped now become possible to do.  WindowBlinds 5 is still in beta and more skinning features for alpha blended borders are in the works.

Meanwhile, over in DesktopX land, things continue to grow there as well.  2006 is going to be a very interesting year for the whole desktop-eXtension world.  Yahoo bought Konfabulator and so its future we can't predict.  Great widgets keep being made for it. But it seems to be suffering the same problem that DesktopX, Kapsules, and the other widget-enablers have -- it's the same widgets over and over.  Simply put, there are only so many simple things that can be made. That is, the typical content creator is only going to put X amount of time into something that requires the user to go out and download another program in order to use.  The typical new Konfabulator widget gets around 4,000 downloads in its effective life time. That's 4 times more than DesktopX widgets typically get (so it's doing better than DesktopX is at this point).  On the other hand, a typical WindowBlinds skin of similar relative popularity will see 20,000 downloads.  Content authors, in my experience, do keep track of this stuff to a certain degree. As a skinner, I want people using my stuff.  WinCustomize puts a lot of energy into trying to have accurate download counts (some sites count views as downloads for instance).  We want to know how many people are using our creations.  Not all skinners are driven by downloads, each person has their own motivation -- the drive to simply create interesting things for oneself can be strong. 

But as with all things, there comes a point where it's work.  That's the problem widgets face.  Widgets are cool, I use them, but there's roughly only 20 different widgets (really less but being generous).  The rest are different skins on those same 20 widgets.  To go to the next level, you have to put a lot of work.  That's where gadgets come in.  Gadgets don't require a user to go and download another program.  They're stand-alone.  And with Microsoft supporting gadgets in Windows Vista (and they've promised us they will support XP too) that means gadgets could provide the opportunity for new types of things.  Or gadgets that take a popular widget concept and add immensely useful features such as the DeskNotes Gadget.  But it was in October that DesktopGadgets.com got started.  Stardock is working on a number of pretty sophisticated gadgets.  Don't expect to see dozens and dozens of gadgets on DesktopGadgets.com, while we're averaging about 15 to 20 gadgets being submitted each week, we're rejecting nearly all of them on the basis of quality or content (i.e. if they're essentially just widgets in terms of sophistication then they should just be released as widgets here on WinCustomize).

ANYWAY...

While widgets may indeed be a marketing phenomenon as opposed to being truly popular, there's no doubt that alternative desktops are popular.  Gef's Dark Professional DesktopX theme has gotten over 100,000 downloads and is the second most popular thing on WinCustomize this month.

The popularity of full-blown saved .desktop files over widgets (of all sorts) does beg the question -- do people want to download individual widgets or is the ideal desktop one in which someone has taken several of those 20 unique widgets and created a consistent, themed desktop with it that would then be part of a WindowBlinds visual style and an icon package?  For instance, I used Aero's Revenge and it is really quite slick. It's not just pretty, it's functional.

Meanwhile, over in icons, while the summer wasn't a great time for icons, the Fall has brought some renewed interest.  Next time I'll cover some of the cool icons that have come out.  It's been a pretty good month for icon packages for IconPackager as well!

The Detroit News just had an article on how the United States, and Michigan in particular, is starting to fall behind in terms of being able to produce enough qualified people with technical degrees (Physics, Math, Engineering, Computer Science, etc.).

When combined with the very restrictive H1B Visas to bring in good candidates from overseas, companies are finding themselves increasingly outsourcing for these key future markets.  We're not talking outsourcing guys to India to work in IT or in sweat shops.  We're talking core R&D, product development, etc.

Here's the article:

http://www.detnews.com/specialreports/2005/math/index.htm

Here's my little part:
http://www.detnews.com/2005/project/0510/23/S17-357568.htm 

Firefox, a free alternative browser, enjoys a roughly 9% overall market share on the net.  But here on WinCustomize.com, it has grown to over 25% of users now using it and rising.

So why is Firefox so popular here on WinCustomize.com?  Of the 22 million visitors last month, that means over 5 million of them were using Firefox.  Of course on the down-side, it's murdering our Alexa ranking (Alexa currently requires Internet Explorer). But that's a different story.

When you install software that has EULAs, do you read them? Probaby not. But you might be surprised what you are agreeing to when you install a program.  But who has time? A new program called EULAyzer will scan your EULAs for you and highlight key words to look for.

EULAlyzer can analyze license agreements in seconds, and provide a detailed listing of potentially interesting words and phrases. Discover if the software you're about to install displays pop-up ads, transmits personally identifiable information, uses unique identifiers to track you, or much much more.

The Benefits

• Discover potentially hidden behavior about the software you're going to install
• Pick up on things you missed when reading license agreements
• Keep a saved database of the license agreements you view
• Instant results - super-fast analysis in just a second

And with additional features like the EULA Research Center, which optionally allows users to anonymously submit license agreements they scan to help us to further improve the program, everyone can be a part of the effort to make something that used to be so tedious, so easy.

FastKake is a handy little freeware program not so much designed for power users but for casual users.  Upon being run, it automatically generates a bunch of shortcuts that go into a folder on the desktop. These short-cuts include almost everything that a casual user would want to do.  For anyone who has a parent or uncle who is calling you for computer help on a regular basis, FastKake can make things a bit easier for you -- by giving it to them.

Betanews is reporting that a class-action lawsuit against Apple over the recently reported scratches to their new portable media player device, the iPod Nano.  Consumers have been reporting that the screens on the new iPod scratch very very easily.  Apple has insisted that the Nano uses the same material as previous iPods.

However, the lawsuit claims that Apple used a thinner layer of the resin the protects the screen and as a result is more prone to scratches.  Some users have reported that the carrying case for the iPod Nano is enough to scratch the display.  Once the display becomes scratched enough, it's largely unusable.  However, some users (as reported on PowerUser.tv) have found cleaning substances that eliminate the results of light scratching.

Spent a lot of time this weekend working on the game. There's just so much to do.

Maintainence costs of planetary improvements weren't implemented which messed up the economic balancing.

The cost of production wasn't being correctly calculated.  Right now, there's still an issue with production bonuses which I'll hae to work on.

The AI is building fleets. Not well. But I had to turn it off because it's made the game very unstable. We'll have to fix that this week.

The AI now designs ships MUCH more effectively. Very pleased with that result.  That required a lot of bug hunting and a different way of designing the ships which I think makes the game better.  Now, AI ships are named like "Frigate M5".  So players will bea ble to just glance at a ship name and see how good it is.

The AI is starting to get smarter about researching.  GalCiv II's tech tree has category tags which allow it to have a good idea of what it should be going for. I may add more AI tags to make that even easier and allow for more user-modding.

The planet labels need work.  I would like to see a planet label that gives more information.  A planet label should (in a visually interesting way) display:

The planet name (of course).

The population of the planet as an integer in millions (like 15) (for 15.1 million)

Whether it has a starport or not and whether that starport is building something or not.

What the social status is (are there unused tiles with nothing being built? Are social projects being built?)

I think this could be done as a label with a nice block background or something with a couple of symbols:

[10]Earth[*/$]

Beta 4 is due this Thursday but it may slip to Friday based on how rough things are.