Brad Wardell's Blog

iPod Nano screen scratches easily..

Published on Saturday, September 24, 2005 By Brad Wardell In WinCustomize News

Found this over at Neowin...People slavering to get Apple's "impossibly small" iPod Nano into their sticky hands may want to pause a moment: those ahead of them in the queue have discovered that it's also unbelievably easy to scratch the screen, nixing its photo-displaying abilities. Apple's discussion forums are already host to a 188-post thread on the topic, where people have spotted that the plastic used for the screen and front of the product is as sensitive as a Kate Moss sponsor.

Trouble is that a few scratches will quickly make the color screen all but useless for viewing album art and photos stored on the machine. In which case you might as well have bought the cheaper, screen less iPod shuffle, hmm? When the point was put to the head of Apple's iPod division, Jon Rubenstein - who in the past oversaw the development of the Titanium PowerBook - the one that killed off Wi-Fi reception, because metal cages do that - he replied: "Nah, you don't really think that? It's made of the hardest polycarbonate... You keep it in a pocket with your keys?"

We Failed You? Try again.

Published on Saturday, September 24, 2005 By Brad Wardell In US Domestic

(received this in my email today)

For your review:  An outstanding rebuttal (published in National Review) to novelist and occasional New Orleans resident Anne Rice's op-ed which appeared in last week's New York Times.

September 07, 2005, 8:26 a.m.
We Failed You? Try Again.
Anne Rice blames America, not local officials.

"To my country I want to say this: During this crisis you failed us. You looked down on us; you dismissed our victims; you dismissed us. You want our Jazz Fest, you want our Mardi Gras, you want our cooking and our music. Then when you saw us in real trouble, when you saw a tiny minority preying on the weak among us, you called us "Sin City," and turned your backs." - novelist and New Orleans resident Anne Rice

 

Let me get this straight.

Ms. Rice, you live in (what was) a very attractive city which lies below sea level. On one side you have a giant lake; on the other side you have the Gulf of Mexico. Running through the middle is the Mississippi River. All of which are above you.

Preventing those giant bodies of water from flooding and drowning you are levees. These levees are described as "century-old." People have been warning about the devastating effects of a direct hit from a hurricane for decades.

I've heard a great deal of complaint in recent days that the federal government may not have allocated enough money to speed up the upgrades to those levees. This does, however, raise the question of why city and state residents were waiting around for the federal government to send enough money to upgrade this, instead of paying for it themselves. I mean, it was only your homes, businesses, and lives at stake. Perhaps these upgrades would have been expensive. If only this city had some sort of events to attract tourists, from which to collect taxes.

Anyway, your state and local officials decided to spend your tax dollars on something else that they (and presumably you) found more important, and then they waited for the rest of the country to pay for these life-preserving necessities.

Your beloved city and region has a colorful political history, in which there is, oh, a wee bit of corruption. I'm from New Jersey, so I can't throw stones at that glass house. But you guys have managed to pick leaders who give you the worst of both worlds - they're scandal ridden and incompetent in a crisis. Look, Rudy Giuliani might have run around with Judith Nathan before his divorce, but he was a hell of a leader in our darkest hours. You know the National Review crowd isn't a fan of Pataki, but the man was a rock after 9/11 compared to Governor Weepy I'll-Evacuate-Eventually and Mayor It's-Everybody's-Fault-Except-Mine. Nobody's throwing around the adjective "Churchillian" about any of your officials these days. We didn't pick your local officials; you guys did.

Rice asks, "how many times did Gov. Kathleen Blanco have to say that the situation was desperate? How many times did Mayor Ray Nagin have to call for aid?"

Ahem. What about those buses left unused, less than a mile from the Superdome? JunkYardBlog notes that it's written in the Southeast Louisiana Evacuation Plan that buses are supposed to be used for evacuation of those who don't have personal vehicles. As JYB observes, "there is something very peculiar about a city and a state that have a plan on the books for years that outlines what to do when a hurricane is about to strike, yet when a hurricane comes roaring in, the responsible officials just chuck the plan and try winging it. Delaying and then winging it in the face of a monstrous Cat 4/5 hurricane is never, ever a good idea, especially for New Orleans." (See more here.) Ironically, Nagin told CNN, "I need buses, man," when he had plenty sitting around unused before the storm hit. Now they're flooded and useless.

But it's not like state and local officials could have seen this coming. They have never had a hurricane bearing down on them before and... oh, wait, there was Hurricane Ivan just last year. And after that dodged bullet, Blanco and Nagin both acknowledged they needed a better evacuation plan.

I would note that we've seen some pretty intense disasters in other parts of the country, like planes crashing into skyscrapers and subsequently collapsing, earthquakes, tornadoes, blizzards, and yet somehow, none of these disasters had the total breakdown of law and order, civil society, etc. Jonah Goldberg's early joke about a Mad-Max style post-apocalyptic tribal anarchy may have been in poor taste, but it has turned out to be nightmarishly prescient.

We failed you? No, oh brilliant creator of Exit to Eden, you failed. You might not think of it this way, but: Your leaders failed to upgrade the levees. You elected a bunch of weepers and blame-shifters who lost their head in a crisis.

Over the past decades, your elected officials have let a criminal element incubate and grow until they ruled the streets, instead of the forces of law and order. In pop culture, a New Orleans thief is always a charming rogue with a devilish smile. In reality, they're a bunch of thugs.

If the number of residents who are looting thugs were such a "tiny minority," we wouldn't have seen this widespread, relentless anarchy. Madam, a noticeable number of your neighbors saw this disaster as an opportunity to smash a window and run away with a television, an act that reveals much about the inadequacies of the local school system, since that thief won't be enjoying that television with any electricity anytime soon.

I would also note that this is one hell of a police force your local officials hired and that you and your neighbors tolerated. 50 percent turned in their badges during the crisis and quit. Your police superintendent is conceding that some cops were looting. Just want to refresh your memory - four years ago, New York and Washington, planes falling out of the sky, thousands dead, no idea what the hell is coming next... and the cops, among others, showed up to work.

To save you guys now, I - and a lot of other Americans - will pitch in. We are witnessing the biggest mobilization of civilian and military rescue and relief crews in history. But I have a sneaking suspicion you're going to want the rest of us to pay for the rebuilding of your city. (In the near future, we're going to have to have a little chat about the wisdom of building below sea level, directly next to large bodies of water.) And if you're going to come to the rest of us hat in hand, demanding the rest of us clean up after your poor judgment, I'd appreciate a little less "you failed us" and a little more "we've learned our lesson.

"

Are Microsoft's days numbered?

Published on Friday, September 23, 2005 By Brad Wardell In WinCustomize News
CNET is reporting that Microsoft may indeed be seeing the beginning of the end of its technology dominance. As an internal Microsoft memo predicted, the web is becoming a platform.  So does this mean that Google will eventually be the one in charge of our underground sugar mines or will Microsoft, for the foreseeable future, continue to be managing them?

GalCiv II: User Manual

Published on Thursday, September 22, 2005 By Brad Wardell In Galactic Civilizations II

 

 

Rough Draft User Manual

 

 

"Now with extra fiber!"

 

BETA 3

 

 

Written by Brad Wardell

Designer and winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physics

(well, okay, only one of those things is actually true)


 

Introduction

 

In a perfect world the user manual for Galactic Civilizations II would already be done.  But then again, in a perfect world, I would have been one of the cool kids in high-school. Or heck, I’d be cool now.  Because a cool guy wouldn’t have to start out a beta user manual explaining about all the features that aren’t in the game yet.

 

Typically, Stardock games absolutely suck until the last month (or week) before they ship.  The problem with having a sucky game for so far into the development process is that it tends to preclude preview coverage.  And we need preview coverage or we’re doomed.  So this time around, the game still sucks but visually it only half-sucks.  So at least screenshots made of the game won’t be completely embarrassing.

 

 

A little bit about Galactic Civilizations I

 

Before we start telling you about this game, we should start with the first game.  Galactic Civilizations (Windows version) came out in 2003.  Its graphics were fantastic – at least compared to shareware games from 1993. 

 

It was a 2D, sprite based strategy game in which players played as the humans and had to build an interstellar civilization.  Players researched technologies which in turn gave them access to various starships.  A player would literally research "Battleship Technology" and a battleship unit would appear in their list of ships that they could build.  Because we had been told..repeatedly.. that single player, 2D, turn-based strategy games were a dead end, we only budgeted for 30,000 units to be sold worldwide.

 

When the game came out, however, it didn’t sell 30,000 copies.  It sold 150,000 copies (85,000 in North America alone).  It also got really good reviews which were a key element of those sales no-doubt (which reminds me, I’m still scheduled to go mow editor lawns still but that’s another story).

 

What we do at Stardock is we make games we want to play.  We wanted to play Galactic Civilizations and so we kept tweaking and tweaking the game until what actually shipped was a pretty mature title in terms of game play being reasonably well thought-out. 

 

But like all Stardock games, it sucked until weeks before it went gold.  This also meant it received no preview coverage what-so-ever.  We couldn’t even get one of those "coming soon" listings in most magazines even though our date was set for February 2003 (eventually it shipped in March so that we didn’t collide with Master of Orion 3).

 

 

What’s missing in this beta

 

Oh where do we start.  Oh about not having a user manual. That’s my fault, I had promised friends, family, reviewers, and the Amish that I would not write the manual for Galactic Civilizations II. And we have someone terrific doing it.  But we wanted to wait until the game was..you know..functional before subjecting them to it.  With the litigious world we live in, the last thing we wanted was a lawsuit for causing blindness, madness, or Turrets syndrome.

 

  • Graphically the game is about half-way there.  We don’t have bump mapping in.  We tried to get it in for this beta but there’s just so much to do.  But there’s also a ton of other missing graphics, images, etc.
  • While you can play as any race, we suggest you play as the humans because they’re the only ones where we’ve started putting in the non-sucky textures and models in for. Play as the humans for now.
  • The diplomacy is really rudimentary.  Because you can play as any race, we have to put in a lot more work to make sure that the dialog back and forth is interesting and real.
  • Fleet combat isn’t in yet. This is one of the major new features of Galactic Civilizations II. Naturally, it’s not in.  (See "We suck" for more details). And by we I mean me since I am the one who scheduled its implementation for October. 
  • The AI… The AI is the one part of the game I’m programming myself. Which means, naturally, it’s awful right now.  But at the same time, it’s a good self-esteem builder since it should be easy to defeat.
  • Playability. This beta isn’t fun to play.  Not just because the AI isn’t in but because there’s very little playability done to it yet.  Things take too long to build (or too short), things are excessively hard to manage, we’re missing a lot of screens that make the game more intuitive, etc.
  • No Campaign. The game will have a dynamic single player campaign.  It’s not in and won’t be in until November.
  • No Metaverse. The final game will let people compete against other players on-line via the Metaverse.  It’s not multiplayer, but people had a blast the first time around.  We plan to do a lot more with it this time. But we won’t be getting to that until November/December.
  • Performance. The game is kind of a pig right now speed-wise. It doesn’t use a lot of memory, we just haven’t really set out yet to optimize screen painting, load times and that kind of thing yet.
  • Load/Save Games.  These work…kind of.  The final game will allow you to save at special "save points". Just kidding, you can save and load your game any time anywhere.
  • Polish.  There’s all kinds of tweaks and pacing issues that we are very fully aware of.  Right now we’re just focusing on getting the features in, so there hasn’t been much effort put into "fun" yet.  Even things like missing status screens and such can make a big difference to making the game feel organic vs. feeling sterile.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Requirements for this beta

 

The beta should run on pretty much any machine with a decent (64MB) video card running Windows 98, ME, 2000, or XP.  But we’ve really only put it through its paces on Windows XP.

 

We are targeting people with very low end systems (Pentium II level systems) to be able to play the final game as long as they upgrade their video card to something that can do DirectX 9 (i.e. modern $25 video card).

 

 


 

Starting a game

 

 

Your best option here to choose "New Game". 

 

Galaxy Setup

 

 

On this screen you (wait for it) set up your galaxy.  In the beta, that means you pick the size of the galaxy.  In the final game,  you will also have option to choose custom galaxies (ones we or other players have made).

 

The scenario will eventually let you choose different custom sets of rules to enhance replayability and to ensure we, the developers, can do different spins on the game without mucking with the main game mechanics. J

You can also set up how many good planets there are, how many planets there are total (which we may remove this because it’s kind of silly to make people pick habitable planets and dead planets both).

 

We will also be removing the Asteroid field option in the next beta since we’re not going to have asteroid fields in the final game (game balancing would take too long).

 

 

Pick your race

 

 

This screen had nothing similar in GalCiv I.  In the first game you had to play as humans.  This was because it helped the plot and made it cheaper for us to make the game art-work wise.

 

Now, thanks to network based child labor in third world countries, you can now play as the leader of 10 civilizations or design your own civilization (hold on, gotta whip the slaves, okay back).

 

Different races have different advantages and disadvantages.  They also have their own unique ship-styles (see "slaves").  The unique advantages are not in yet though so there’s nothing special here.

 

Note the nice big edit button. The team wants to make sure you press that button! Lots of work under that.

 

If you choose edit on the custom race you can do all kinds of cool stuff.

 

Figure 1: My r ace is sneaky and productive! W00t!

 

 

Choose your opponents

 

 

 

 

On this screen you can decide who you want to play against. You can either set their intelligence individually or crank up the difficulty globally.

 


 

Playing the game

 

 

Once you are in the game you start with a colony ship and a flagship.  The flagship is a special survey ship that can explore anomalies.  The colony ship can be sent to create colonies on habitable worlds.

 

Some basic controls

 

Thanks to the (ahem) power of 3D, you can zoom in and out on the map:

 

Figure 2: Very close.  No textures on the ships yet in this screenshot.

 

Figure 3: Mouse-wheel zoom out and you can see your ship is small.

 

Figure 4: And if you zoom out enough, the map turns into a symbolic mode so that you can play the game like a board game. Differnent units have different symbols and their size indicates how "powerful" they are.

 

 

You can also use the function keys to change your point of view:

 

  • F1: Normal view
  • F2: Alternative view, little bit closer to the horizon.
  • F3: Nearly level to the horizon.
  • F4: Galactic Civilizations I view – top down.
  • F5: Strategic view (zoomed out)

 

The Button Bar

The bottom button bar displays the following:

1)      Planet/Ship list

2)      Research Screen

3)      Domestic Policy screen

4)      Foreign Policy Screen

5)      Statistics

6)      Shipyard (ship design)

 

 

 

Bad Playability Example:  We don’t give you any ships with more than 1 move which makes the early part of the game less fun.  So we’ll be changing this.  Both your ships start out with only 1 movement point presently.

 

Mouse controls:

  • You can use button 1 on your mouse to pan around the map.  Just hold it down and drag around.

 

  • Select ships by left-clicking on them.  Right-click on the map (or mini-map) to send them to a destination.

 

  • You can use your middle-mouse button to rotate the map in various ways (hold it down).  If you lose your orientation, hit the F1 key to re-orient yourself.

 

 

 

 

 

 

What matters on the map

 

 

If you put your mouse over a planet, it will state what planet "class" it is.  The higher the class, the more potentially useful the planet is.  A planet must be above class 0 to use.

 

Colony ships are what colonize planets.

 

You will also see color-coded borders.  If you’re race is blue, you can see on the mini map and the main map your borders.  In the final game, your units will get a 10% bonus to their stats when they fight in their territory.  If you have planets that are not in your borders, they are likely to revolt at some point.

 

The mini-map has a whole array of different visual options to choose from.  The main screen also will display your population, treasury, research status, and the galactic balance of power meter. 

 

Figure 5: These buttons will be to manage way-points for ships. Very handy.

 

 

Planets

 

When you send a colony ship to a planet, you will often encounter various events that help determine what kind of civilization you are (good or evil). 

 

The planet view is totally new from Galactic Civilizations I.  The planet class now determines how many of the 72 tiles on a planet can be used. 

 

 

On a class 14 planet there are 14 useable tiles.  Some tiles have special items on it (artifacts, culture bonuses, mineral rich). 

 

 

The main variables on a planet are:

 

  • Its population in millions which determines how much tax revenue you will receive. Population is capped by either morale (if it gets too low) or by food (you must build farms to produce food). If you can produce 10 megatons of food per week then you can support a population of up to 10 million.
  • Unemployment is going to go away so ignore that.
  • Your approval rating determines how happy your people are.  Happy people are more productive.  Literally. 50% approval will halve your production.

 

Things to build on a planet

 

There are several types of things people would want to build on a planet:

 

  • Farms.  Farms produce food which allow ones population to grow. More population means more $ produced.
  • Factories/Mines.  These produce resources which are spent on building ships, building more planetary improvements.
  • Research Labs.  These produce research units which go into your overall technology research pool.
  • Cultural Centers.  Embassies and other special buildings increase the amount of influence the planet has which in turn increases its effect on your borders.
  • Morale boosters.  These are special buildings that increase the morale of your people.  People gotta have stuff to do for fun or they get miserable.
  • Starports.  You can’t just start building interstellar ships on some miserable world.  You now have to use up one of your precious tiles and build a star port.

 

Build vs. Buy

 

You can dedicate your planet’s resources towards building a ship or you can hire a private contractor to crank out the ship in a single turn – for a price.

 

 

 

 

Research Screen

 

 

The research screen allows you to research new technologies.  Technologies provide new abilities.

 

This screen is broken up between the list of techs and their info and a visual display of the tech tree.

 

This screen still needs work.

 

 

When a technology is researched, the event window will come up informing you.  This screen needs a lot of love ..

 

 

 

 

Domestic Policy

 

 

On this screen players set up what their tax rate is.  The higher the taxes the more money you collect but the unhappier your people get.

 

When elections come, the AVERAGE morale (not the snapshot anymore) will be what determines the election.  So keep those people happy all the time.

 

You can also spend your money between military, social, and research.  These ratios determine how much your factories and labs are funded to do their thing.

 

Foreign Policy

 

 

The foreign policy screen allows you to interact with the other civilizations.  It is not really well tested yet in this build.

 

Shipyard

 

New in Galactic Civilizations II is the ability to design your own ships.  And since we have a 3D engine, we decided to just go nuts with it.  Bear in mind, again, that we don’t have all the textures and models in so it’ll be even cooler when it’s done.

 

 

When you first arrive at the shipyard, you will see a list of your current designs.  You can upgrade your ships any time you want.  All your ships, regardless of where they’re located, will be upgraded.  BUT…

 

Depending on how dramatic of a change your "upgrade" is, ships will go into "refit" mode on screen in which they refit themselves to the new changes.  While they are in refit mode, they are totally defenseless and cannot be moved.  A refit might only take 1 game turn or it might take 50.  Moreover, ships that are outside your territory suffer a 2X time penalty to refit.  Refitting time is also based on the production of the planet it was produced on.

 

Designing a ship

 

 

Choosing a Hull

When you design a ship, first you have to select what type of hull it has.  The larger the hull the more hitpoints it will have and the more components it can fit.  But it also largely determines the cost of the ship.

 

There are many different types of hulls to choose from.  The difference between one hull of the same size and another is purely cosmetic.

 

Extras = Eye candy

 

Players have total control (okay, ridiculously intense control) of how the ship will look.  You can make a ship as complicated as you (and your computer hardware) can handle.  We wash our hands of your craziness!

 

You can pick a variety (and in this beta we only have a handful of non sucky eye candy in, lots more coming).

 

You can connect your pieces by selecting one and then clicking on the red "hard point" you want to put it on. 

 

Or if you’re wimpy, like me, you can just double-click on a component (or press the place button) and it’ll stick it on the ship for you based on a fairly cool system of knowing where a good place to put it is.

 

This way, crazy people who want to design their own mega ship as well as grumps who just want to quickly build a ship can both live together in harmony.  Though, not likely under the same roof…

 

At first, you won’t have any weapons or defenses for your ship.  That’s what technology researching can cure.  But you can start making crazy stuff early on.

 

 

Once you are done, you save your ship and you can start building it.

 

Figure 6: The Nerdling Avenger goes forward...without any weaons..

 

 

 

Warfare

 

In Galactic Civilizations II there are 3 types of weapons and 3 types of defenses. 

 

Weapons:

 

  • Beam weapons
  • Mass Drivers
  • Missiles

 

Defenses:

 

  • Shields (defend against beam)
  • Armor (defend against mass drivers)
  • Point defense (defend against missiles)

 

When a weapon comes against its corresponding defense, the weapon rolls between 0 and its maximum attack value and the defense rolls between 0 and its maximum defense value.  Non-optimal defenses can help too but they roll between 0 and the SQUARE ROOT of their maximum-defense.

 

Example:

 

The USS Enterprise attacks the USS Reliant.  The Enterprise has phasers rated at 10.  The Reliant has Shields rated at 4 and armor rated at 16!

 

When the enterprise attacks, it rolls between 0 and 10.  The Reliant rolls its defense which is going to be between 0 and 8 (0 to 4 + 0 to square root of 16 which equals 4 therefore 8 total).

 

We don’t want players who picked the "wrong" defense to be totally out of luck.  But we don’t want to reward players who focus strictly on one defense type.

 

 

Options

 

The game will have a ton of various options to choose from to let players totally control how they want the game to paly out.

 

 

The video options are important.  Make sure that you have anti-aliasing on as high as your system can go because it makes a huge difference to how the game looks.  Most of these settings require you to reload the game (sorry!).

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Story Continues…

 

And so your civilization must go out, colonize planets, research technologies, design ships, form alliances, negotiate treaties, fight wars, etc.

 

Eventually you will be able to conquer your opponents (or be conquered by them) through a variety of means (military conquest, cultural domination, technological superiority, or political victory).

 

 

 

 

 

 

Support & Help

 

 

The home page of Galactic Civilizations II is https://www.galciv2.com

 

Stardock Entertainment

15090 Beck Rd.

Plymouth Michigan 48170

734-927-0677

 


 

Credits

 

Designer & Product Manager

Brad Wardell

 

Project Leader

Scott Tykoski

 

User Interface Designer

Paul Boyer

 

Development Lead

Cari Begle

 

Engine Developer

Joe Engalen

 

AI Developer

Brad Wardell

 

Developers

Cari Begle

Joe Engalen

Jesse <get spelling>

Scott Tykoski

Brad Wardell

Paul Kerchen

Scott Brodie

 

Art & Animation

Alex Gounaropolous

Scott Tykoski

Paul Boyer

Jake Callery

Scott Brodie

Akil Dawkins

Paul <Ensemble Studios’ Paul>

<Alex’s Intern – get name>

 

Story & Elements

Brad Wardell

Kristin Hatcher

Alexander Antoniades

 

Quality Assurance

 

 

Biz

Angela Marshall

Larry Kuperman

Kim Kolaz

 

Metaverse

Pat Ford

Andrew Powell

Cari Begle

Laurence Parry

 

Music

Mason Fischer

 Eric Heberling

 

Final Documentation

 Someone other than Brad

RIAA kills off eDonkey, WinMX

Published on Thursday, September 22, 2005 By Brad Wardell In WinCustomize News

Betanews is reporting that The RIAA has managed to shut down WinMX, a popular peer-to-peer file sharing service.  In addition, eDonkey has apparently been shut down by Reuters (though its website remains up).

Since most P2P networks today are decentralized, eliminating a P2P network completely is nearly impossible.  However, the RIAA strategy seems to revolve around shutting down "super nodes" that, as a practical matter, cripples a given P2P service.

Microsoft reorganization reactions

Published on Thursday, September 22, 2005 By Brad Wardell In WinCustomize News

Microsoft has reorganized itself into three main divisions. This comes as news of Jim Allchin, the head of Windows development, will be retiring after Windows Vista ships late next year.

Reactions on the net have been mixed.  CNET has a story that covers a wide variety of reaction from bloggers across the Internet.

Symantec: Mozilla browsers more vulnerable

Published on Thursday, September 22, 2005 By Brad Wardell In WinCustomize News

Symantec is claiming that Mozilla based web browsers are more vulnerable to attack than Microsoft's Internet Explorer. 

However, some (such as us) are skeptical of these claims as Symantec is basing its opinion on the number of security flaws that have been confirmed by the vendor.  Uncinformed, unacknowledged security holes do not get counted.  Nor is the number of actual available exploits being weighted in.

It should be noted that Symantec's software routinely flags software as being "dangerous" based on languages used rather than actual danger.  For example, widgets or gadgets that use VB Script are routlinely blocked by running by Symantec's security products.

Whether Internet Explorer is less secure than the Mozilla browser remains a matter of debate. It largely depends on who you talk to and how you define a vulnerability.

Whining about "Stealing ideas" is pointless

Published on Thursday, September 22, 2005 By Brad Wardell In Personal Computing

It seems every time a larger company incorporates a feature that a smaller company has that a bunch of people start screaming bloody murder.  Shrieks of "copying" and "stealing" come up.  What's the point?  Last year the folks who made Konfabulator made a be stink when Apple incorporated Dashboard into the OS.  I totally agreed with Konfabulator's developers that it was pretty lame on Apple's part but in the end, complaining just looks bad I think to most people.  The fact is, if you make something good, other people will want to make something similar. That's life.

And I say that with some experience...


Object Desktop in 1995/1997

This is a screenshot of Object Desktop taken in 1997.  Mind you the product originally was released in 1995 and was in public beta testing in 1994.  It had features that were quite new (Windows 3.1 was the OS in 1994).  It provided featurs such as a skinnable UI for the entire OS (what we call WindowBlinds today), treated .ZIP files as compressed folders, allowed users to package up desktops (Object Package), Had a big sidebar on the right side with virtual desktops, system info, a clock, etc.

So when Microsoft and other companies started treating ZIP files like compressed folders, we didn't make a peep of complaint even though we were the first to do it.  Why? Because we didn't think the idea was non-obvious. 

Similarly, even though (to our knowledge) no product or OS had ever done a sidebar quite like this (NeXTStep's dock is pretty dissimilar), we haven't made a peep about other sidebars and such when they came along.

Even in 2001, when Microsoft incorporated GUI skinning into the OS using the exact same mechanism as WindowBlinds (uxtheme.dll in Windows XP might as well be WindowBlinds LE or something) we didn't complain or make a huge uproar. 

When in 2003 Konfabulator came out with a program that essentially did a subset of features of what DesktopX had been doing for 3 years, we didn't accuse them of stealing their ideas from us.  The only thing we objected to was their claims that they had somehow invented the concept.  It should be noted that we never claimed to have invented the concept.  We were inspired by IBM's work on an OpenDoc based desktop back in 1996.

And when we learned that Microsoft was going to be doing gadgets some time ago, we could have made a huge stink about that too.  Gone to CNET and Wired and other media outlets and talked about how Microsoft was "stealing" from us.  But we didn't.

Why don't we? Because nobody likes a whiner.  And in our experience, each change brings a new opportunity. Software companies must endeavor to adapt and change to new circumstances.  The only metric that should be used in my mind is whether a change is good for users/customers or not. 

To be sure, it's annoying when users will say "Oh, Stardock's screwed." Or even more annoying when someone else gets credit for what we were doing first simply because they squeaked louder.  But the reality is, in the long-term, changes bring new opportunities.

For example, looking at that Object Desktop screenshot from 1997 (which has the same features as were present in 1995) you can see a proto-Sidebar, Compressed Folders, ObjectDock, widgets/gadgets, WindowFX, WindowBlinds.  But changes have spark new innovation.

Most people don't realize this but WindowBlinds didn't really take off until after Windows XP shipped.  When Microsoft embraced GUI skinning, it opened the door to far greater opportunities.  It legitimized what we were doing.   Similarly, we had long discovered that users were generally not willing to pay money to run someone else's widget, we had already begun to migrate towards stand-alone widgets (gadgets).  But for us, the challenge was, how do we spread the word about why they'd want to use gadgets? Voila, Microsoft comes in and is going to do much of that evangelizing for us.  People don't care how their little RSS reader is made.   Does anyone care what compiler we use to make TweakVista? No.  Will people care what program is used to create gadgets? No. They will only care about what the gadget does.


Object Desktop in 2000.

This pattern will keep repeating itself as long as we continue to make software that extends and enhances the operating system.  And those that bitch and moan the loudest about being copied from will probably continue to receive unfair credit for "innovation" over us. But in the long term, I think people are more comfortable dealing with companies that look challenges as potential opportunities rather than looking for pity. 

DesktopGadgets.com launched

Published on Tuesday, September 20, 2005 By Brad Wardell In WinCustomize News

DesktopGadgets.com has been launched!  DesktopGadgets.com is a new website dedicated to the sale and distribution of mini-applets called "Gadgets".  Gadgets are a new category of software designed to provide information, useful lookup, or enhance an application or service on your computer.  Common gadgets include clocks, weather forceasters, sticky notes, system status meters, website data and more.

Gadgets are similar in concept to "widgets" which have received extensive coverage in the form of Apple's Dashboard, Yahoo's Konfabulator, Kapsules, and Stardock's DesktopX.  However, unlike widgets, gadgets do not require any additional downloads to make them work.  A user who downloads a gadget can run that gadget immediately whereas with widgets, user have to make sure they already have DesktopX or Konfabulator or whatever corresponding widget enabler already installed.  As a result, different programs can create gadgets and they will all work together.

This month at the Professional Developer's Conference (PDC), Microsoft announced it would be supporting gadgets as a native part of Windows Vista.  DesktopGadgets.com will support any kind of gadget regardless of what program was used to create them.  The most popular way to create gadgets presently is with DesktopX Pro.  However, at PDC, Microsoft introduced a new development suite called Expression. When combined with Visual Studio 2005, developers will be able to create gadgets in that way as well.

DesktopGadgets.com will be intensely moderated to ensure only premium-level content is available regardless of whether the gadget is free or to be sold.  Net revenue collected from the sale of gadgets is split evenly between the website and the gadget maker.

Links:
View: DesktopGadgets.com
View: DesktopX Pro Home Page

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