Ever taken a "purity" test? I did in college and they're kind of a fun party game.  They tell you how..pure or impure you are.  It's on a scale from 0 to 100 with 100 being most pure and 0..well if you scored a 0...yikes!

So here's the test, feel free to post your results.  I'll post mine shortly.

WindowBlinds 4.6 is now available for registered users of WindowBlinds as well as for Object Desktop users.  The shareware version will be available next week. Version 4.6 includes a host of new features including glow effects for title bar buttons, new shellstyle and other support for easier msstyle translations, performance tweaks, and a fix for Internet Explorer 7 beta users (painting issues).

Use Stardock Central to get the latest version of WindowBlinds.

Jark is my friend.  He's been my friend for a long time.  I'm unhappy about the situation with deviantART.  Jark (Scott Jarkoff) and his friend Matteo (Matt Stephens) founded deviantART back in 2000.  The site was started with the help of Angelo Sotira (Spyed) as well but I don't think it's accurate to say Spyed is a co-founder of deviantART any more than it is accurate to give the CEO of say Ziff-Davis the co-founding credit of every magazine they publish.

deviantART, especially when it was launched, was a truly unique experience and its uniqueness put it on the path that has led to where it is today.  And about a week ago, the company that owns deviantART fired Jark without giving any sort of public explanation.  I don't think that's acceptable.  Jark deserves better than that.

Let me tell you the kind of friend Scott Jarkoff is.  Let me tell you about the man he really is.  He's a man of principle. A man of strong moral character.  He is not the kind of person who becomes paralyzed by shades of gray.  He doesn't worry about "appearances".  He worries about what is right and what is wrong. And he takes stands on things based on what he believes in.

Jark is a man who doesn't just say things that sound ethical and moral. He does things that are ethical and moral. He is a man of action.  Let me give you two examples where, at risk to himself, took a strong stand to help his friend (me in these cases) because he thought it was the right thing to do.

Example 1: The GUI Olympics

The first example took place in 2002.  We had put together this inter-website contest called the GUI Olympics.  And I fully admit that we at Stardock were incredibly naive in the way we had set it up. I say that because to help create a sense of equality and paternity, each member site was allowed elect a judge to represent their site without those sites having to have put in any real effort into the contest. As a result, they didn't really have a vested interest in hoping the contest was successful.  Stardock, in its naivete, had basically created a giant-give away to "the community" skin sites without really getting anything substantial in return. 

Stardock, which had come up with the contest, organized it, was paying for the contest and running it would have 3 judges. Each participating site would have one judge.  The rules for the contest were posted from the onset.

Over the course of weeks, Stardock burned the midnight oil to build an independent skin site (the GUI Olympics website) to host the contest and provide a place for judging.  Once it was done and as it was about to begin, a number of the sites started objecting that Stardock (gasp, a commercial company) should have so many judges. They insisted that Stardock be given 1 vote (so it would have 1 vote in 9).  Nevermind that the prize money given out was split between the skinners and the sites and therefore their demand would, in effect, create the potential for collusion -- a couple of sites could get together and potentially rig the judging so that skinners representing their sites would win. And nevermind that Stardock was the one paying for the whole thing.  And ignore that Stardock was the one running the contest (coding the sites, doing the database work, moderating, etc.).  They also demanded a host of other changes including changes to the rules, changes to how the skins would be displayed, etc.  Mind you, they made these demands right before the contest was about to start.  And bear in mind, they demanded this despite their only contributions to the contest being judging the skins -- not exactly a sacrifice. And for that they'd be receiving part of the $10k in cash and prizes being handed out by us along with links back to their sites.  And on top of all the other demands, they also insisted that skin authors not have their names publicly displayed until after the contest -- which would have essentially killed the contest since public recognition is a major factor for skinners. 

For those of us who were working 70 hour weeks trying to get this thing going, the idea of going back and making these changes along with what we thought were obvious conflict of interest issues in allowing the sites who would be receiving money having so much say over how the prize money would be handed out was appalling.  During the course of it, I was called all kinds of names and made to look like I (personally) was out to "Screw over" skinners (how having a contest with cash and prizes can be turned into a "Screw skinners" thing is beyond me but that's what got spread).

But Jark alone of the major skin sites rejected their demands.  Jark took the position that it was our contest to run as we see fit and if they didn't like the way we were running our contest they should get off their asses and run their own contest (which, incidentally, none of these sites ever did).  And in fact, only Skinbase and deviantART via Jark stood up to the other sites.  As a result, the "committee of rule changes" fell apart since as a practical matter, by 2002 WinCustomize and deviantART represented the lion's share of the skinning community and as long as we had Jark's support, the contest could go forward.

The easy path would have been to ride the bandwagon. After all, the "committee" had made themselves out to be the saviors of poor exploited skinners and Stardock was the big bad corporate overlord.  But he took the harder path even though he had to disagree with other on-line friends and do what he thought was right.

Example 2: The TGT Soft incident

The second example came two years later.  It was a week before Christmas 2003 and software developer TGT Soft had demanded that it have the right to use the IconPackager .iptheme format we had created without having to license it from us so that their program Style XP could compete against IconPackager without having to go through the trouble of getting people to create icon packages in any format they came out with or having to pay to host such icon packages.  When we refused to simply give them permission without some type of compensation, they filed a lawsuit against us demanding a court force us to hand over rights to the .iptheme format without any sort of licensing agreement.

A "company" site would probably go and play neutral.  But Jark took a stand.  He condemned TGT Soft and refused to post any more news on them (Betanews.com and Neowin.net have done likewise).  But Jark was the first to do so and deviantART -- run by Jark -- was the only website to publicly condemn what many felt was the corporate equivalent of ripping. 

And I've been thinking of these incidents and countless like them in which Scott Jarkoff displayed a level of integrity and nobility that goes beyond anything one could ever expect in a single human being.  And while I cannot hope to match Jark's integrity, I can try to match his loyalty.  And therefore, I will publicly state this -- on behalf of Stardock Corporation, its shareholders, and Stardock's affiliated websites and partner websites (which are more than most people are probably aware of), we urge the company deviantART, Inc. to settle with Scott Jarkoff in a fair and reasonable manner.  We urge the company deviantART, Inc. to put together a fair and accurate history of deviantART that is created as a collaborative effort between Angelo, Scott, and Matt.  We urge deviantART, Inc. to reinstate Jark with a new "Founder" access class (or better) pending a formal settlement.   We urge deviantART to acknowledge the importance that Jark played in the creation of deviantART.  There would be no deviantART without Jark and to strip someone of their creation in such a way is not right. If both parties can't work together, it should be handled with delicacy and sensitivity.

By doing these things, we believe that deviantART can avert permanent damage to the community we care so much about and to the very valuable good-will that it has built over the past 5 years.  We care very much about deviantART and its success and we hope that the company that owns it and Jark can find a way to settle things amicably.

DesktopGadgets.com is nearly ready to launch.  Gadgets have been discussed quite a bit around here.  The only program currently available that allows you to create gadgets is DesktopX Pro.  Gadgets are like widgets except that they are true stand alone programs.  You can send them to anyone running Windows 2000, XP, or Windows Vista (and in many cases Windows 98/ME) and they'll run.  With DesktopX Pro, users have the option of taking their widgets and exporting them as gadgets.

But one need not be a software developer to enjoy gadgets.  For example, last night I took some pictures my mother had sent me and quickly turned them into gadgets that I could send back to her.  Now she has pictures of her grandchildren sitting on her desktop (not as a wallpaper but as a gadget that she can move around the screen).  One of our IT guys whipped up a quickie gadget to have it run a batch file when a certain number of bad email messages are in the bad email queue (to keep disk space from running out on that server).  It's a lot easier to make gadgets than it is to create traditional stand-alone programs.

For a very limited time only (next 20 days or so) Stardock is offering a $40 discount on DesktopX Pro to Object Desktop users.  So instead of it costing $69.95 it only costs $29.95.  But this is only for a limited time. 

If you have Object Desktop, GO HERE TO GET IT

The points system doesn't exist to promote fairness.  It doesn't exist to encourage competition.  It's not even designed to encourage bloggers to blog more.

The points system is designed spefically to promote articles and bloggers that have already gained a readership.  It doesn't care what you write about.  It doesn't care whether you're a liberal or a conservative.  It doesn't care what color your skin is or what sex you are.  It simply designed to promote those who have already succeeded.

And it does this because we assume that those who have gained significant readership of either their articles or their blogs will have written things casual visitors to the site might be interested which in turn might make them more likely to return visit or create a blog themselves.

That's why we have it.  And as a practical result, people who consistently write about cool and interesting things tend to gain readers over time who in turn return to read other things they've written. 

That's what motivated me to create this site in the first place.  I have seen so many good bloggers creating truly insightful things on the net on various "blog" sites only to find that they never get read.  Never get comments. And hence get lost in the noise of cyberspace.

But on Joeuser, what you write gets syndicated to other Stardock.net based sites.  Recent articles all get their shot by being listed in the newest articles.  People who consistently blog have a good chance at being ranked highly. And so that same great blogger, here on JoeUser, is likely to gain a readership. 

I've seen, over the past couple of years, bloggers who have left for one reason or another. And they quickly discover that all the comments and readers they got on JoeUser don't transfer too well because, despite how obvious the JoeUser idea is, it is still (to my knowledge) the world's only blog community on the net (of course, given the technical hassles JU has, it's obviously non-trivial to implement such an interconnected system <g>).

The foundation for all this is the points system.  Without it, we're just another blogspot or live journal or whatever in which people write in perfect isolation.  And I don't know about others, but if I wanted to write things that no one else was going to read, I'd keep a private journal .

The pilot episode of PowerUser.TV is nearly complete and for the third segment of the first episode we cover Yahoo's acquisition of the popular widget enabler, Konfabulator.  Myself and Andrew Powell (developer of Kapsules) talk to Kristin Hatcher about what we think it means to widget developers everywhere.

In about 10 days we are going to do a points audit on the site.  Every time someone makes a comment, post, etc. they receive points for it. It's recorded in a log.

I know, from casual inspection, that some people have far more points than their available # of comments and articles could possibly warrant. 

Now I have a confession to make, I've been very competitive in my life and I've played the system my share of times. I haven't done so here since I'm the #1 user because I know the easiest way to get lots of points -- get other sites to link to what I write which brings lots of readers.  I have many articles with over 50,000 points for instance that have only a couple of comments.  All because people came here to read them.

But many others have taken other routes that we're aware of to get their points up.  That's going to come to an end soon as all scores will be recalculated based on what is actually present on JU.

Stardock has released IconX 1.1.  IconX is a program that enhances your existing Windows desktop icons. When run, your desktop icons instantly look better. IconX can add shadows to your icons, graphical backgrounds to your icon text, sound effects to different mouse interactions with your icons, animated effects for different events, and even automatically have icons zoom up on mouse over (something users used to do by hand with DesktopX).  Users can save their different setups as IconX themes that can be shared with others. Users can also replace their desktop icon images with PNG files instead of only being able to use .ICO files.

IconX is available on its own or as part of Object Desktop.  Its home page is https://www.stardock.com/products/iconx

DesktopX PRO allows users to export widgets as GADGETS.  Gadgets are like widgets in nearly every way except for one crucial difference: They don't require a parent program in order to use. 

As cool as widgets are, there's only so much work that a typical ambitious software developer is going to put into something that they then have to say "Oh, yea, um, to run my widget, you need to go to <insert site here> and download this widget program in order to use what I made." 

Even with Yahoo's recent acquisition of popular widget enabler, Konfabulator, it still requires users to go off and download the 8 to 10 megabyte Yahoo Widget enabler (Konfabulator) just to use a 600k widget.  The same is true of DesktopX widgets and all the others.

But with GADGETS they're stand-alone.  The Neowin gadget is one example. They're still only 800k or so, use little memory and are easy to create but they don't require any extra downloads.  The Vista Explorer is another gadget example. It's only 500K (the 1.5 meg ZIP file contains both a Vista web browser AND file manager, both gadgets).

So getting to the point: Stardock is about to launch DesktopGadgets.com.  A place for people to submit their gadgets either to give-away OR to sell.  When the user uploads their gadget, they set their price. Sales are split 50/50 between the developer and the site.  It'll be heavily moderated so only high quality gadgets will be allowed.

If you are interested in creating gadgets, first you'll need DesktopX Pro. Once you've created a gadget that you think is good, contact me ([email protected]) about being part of the opening launch of DesktopGadgets.com.  And if you know someone who makes gadgets already make sure they know about this news item!

 

The second segment of PowerUser.TV's first episode is now on-line for viewing.  Next Monday will be the official unveiling of PowerUser.TV.

This segment has myself and Kristin Hatcher discussing a new website called SimplyFired. It is a website dedicated to letting people share their termination experiences along with a contest in which the winners will meet The Donald.