OS/2 is a lesson every ambitious game developer needs to know about.  OS/2 in 1994 was so much better than any alternatives that it should have been the defacto OS.  It ran DOS, Windows, and OS/2 programs side by side. It was very stable (rarely crashed).  It had a very easy to use, object oriented interface (Similar to what we finally have in Windows XP) and it had preemptive multitasking and a DirectX capability called DIVE.

Yet, despite all that, despite being from IBM, Windows won.  And it should be a lesson to developers that having the best product - be it a game or whatever, is not the whole story.  Your ability to market and distribute your creation trumps the quality of the game in terms of real success.  That is why a good publisher or distributor is worth their weight in gold.

If a publisher can get your $40 game into the stores and can pay you on time and allow you to sell lots of units, then getting $10 a unit is a great deal for the developer.  Woe to the game developer who focuses on percentages instead of on how much they'll gross.  Because it's better for your game to sell 100,000 units in which you make $10 a piece on then to sell 2,000 units in which you make 100% on each sale.

Long long ago there was a hyper-advanced civilization that had colonized the galaxy. They are called the Precursors.  Eventually, they split into two races who went to war with one another.  Just as the final battle between the two was being fought, they disappeared.  This was hinted at in the first game but not truly explored.

Thousands of years later, new civilizations slowly started making their way into space.  But they lacked the ability to travel great distances.  They built a series of "star gates" that enabled ships to travel between them but it was a massively expensive and inefficient mechanism and didn't really enable colonization as much as it allowed for different races to have some basic relations.

The humans, however, were the youngest of these new races and they also were much more reckless in terms of trying out new technology.  They adapted the star gate technology to design ships with drive systems that effectively could travel much faster than the star gates could and weren't reliant on them.  In short, ships could travel anywhere in the galaxy on their own.

However, this has a negative side effect - now all the civilizations were in a race to colonize and claim as much of the galaxy as fast as they could.

The story of Galactic Civilizations I dealt with that race to claim the galaxy.

In Galactic Civilizations II, we now have the consequences -- the vile and evil Drengin Empire have emerged as the dominant civilization. And they are beginning to conquer the other civilizations.  In The Campaign game (which is different from the regular sand box mode) the player has to go and try to unite the other civilizations to fight off the Drengin.  But in the midsts of this, they will all discover that there are far worse things in the universe than each other.

WinCustomize.com has released the BEST of 2004 DVD.  We took the highest rated, most downloaded skins, themes, icons, wallpapers, etc. from last year and put them onto this interactive DVD.  It comes with a special version of the WinCustomize Skin Browser that makes it a snap to navigate through and apply the contents (it's very slick).  Over 4 gigabytes of the best content that was uploaded to WinCustomize.com can be yours.  100% of the proceeds of the DVD go to help paying for the massive bandwidth costs of this website (and by having the DVD, you'll be able to access our content locally saving even more bandwidth).

Last year saw some fantastic creations and you can have them all and help support WinCustomize for only $24.95.

Stardock is nearing the final stages of ObjectBar version 2.  ObjectBar is a program that is designed to enable users to create their own desktop bars that can replace or suplement the Windows Start bar.  Traditionally, ObjectBar has been used by people wanting to give Windows bars that are similar to what is available on other operating systems (such as the MacOS Finder).  But with ObjectBar 2, Stardock is hoping to give ObjectBar users the flexibility and power to create all kinds of useful yet visually enticing things.

Amongst ObjectBar 2's new features is the ability to embed DesktopX 3 widgets, a completely new, easy to use interface, a skin editor, support for the new Stardock virtual desktops, and the ability to export ones ObjectBar themes as programs (EXEs).

ObjectBar 2 is one of the programs that makes up Stardock's Object Desktop (www.objectdesktop.com). Check out the linked article below to get more information.

ObjectBar is a program that is designed to enable users to create their own replacement Start bars or Finders or Wharfs or what have you. It's fully skinnable and can even inherit WindowBlinds skins. When it was first released, it was quite popular.  But over time, its popularity faded.  Windows XP provided a temporary boost as users of Windows 2000, 98, or ME could use ObjectBar to make their Start bars look like they do on Windows XP. 

Today, however, most users have Windows XP.  And that put in question the role of ObjectBar moving forward.  Some users questioned that ObjectBar could be superceded by DesktopX.  After all, DesktopX lets you create anything that might be on your desktop.  But DesktopX isn't really designed to create bars.  DesktopX doesn't include built in support for making menus and dynamic content has to be scripted. 

By contrast, ObjectBar is focused on one thing - making bars and menus. Even the existing version, 1.6, which is two years old, is better than anything else out there when it comes to having a good  combination of being able to create real Windows desktop bars while still being flexible enough to have them come in all kinds of shapes and sizes.

The role of desktop bars historically

Most people use desktop bar type programs for one of three things: a) Replacing their Windows Start bar with a MacOS Finder-like bar. Replacing their Windows start bar with a Start bar with more features.  c) Adding a Longhorn like bar to their Windows desktop.

That isn't to say that's the only thing people use these kinds of programs, it's just that that is the most common reasons for using them.

Above are examples of ObjectBar 1.6 in action.

So effectively, that's how these have been used.  They can do a lot more than this. There are great themes out there that do some amazing things and there are other programs similar to ObjectBar. But none of them, including ObjectBar, have ever captured the imagination of users in the same way as say full GUI skinning programs like WindowBlinds or widget enabling programs like DesktopX and Konfabulator or desktop building programs such as DesktopX, Litestep, Talisman.  So why is that? Why is the popularity of these kinds of programs limited primarily to those users who want to emulate the Mac finder Bar or the Longhorn dock?

The Next Generation arrives

The reason these desktop bar programs have always remained limited in popularity is that frankly, the Windows Start bar is a pretty good design. And even if it's not ideal, and it's not, the bar programs require way too much work to configure, skin, and customize to have that "perfect" look.

Skinning can only take you so far.  And besides, you want your bar, wharf, whatever to have the same look and feel as the rest of your GUI.  So right there, that kills off most of these desktop bars.  If I'm changing my visual style but my third party desktop bar has its own look, it looks odd.  Some people can overlook that if the desktop bar provides enough functionality to offset that.  But realistically, those that do stick with desktop bars are confined to those users who can find matching skins (which brings us back to them being used largely as Mac finder bar emulators and Longhorn dock emulators since there are lots of skins that fit that).

What some desktop bars have tried to do to make them more compelling is to try to incorporate various popular features directly into the bar program.  Features such as weather monitoring, clocks, CPU meters, RSS feeds, etc.  The problem with that is that the skinner is left with either having to come up with a complex skin to support it or a generic skin where each panel on the bar looks the same.

There's another solution, however.  Widgets.  Anyone who's created a widget can tell you that it's a lot easier to customize the look and feel of a widget than it is to try to create a skin for anything that's remotely as complex.  ObjectBar 2 allows users to add DesktopX 3 widgets to ObjectBar bars!

ObjectBar 2 Highlights

ObjectBar 2 is designed to be useable by everyone -- not just power users.  Here's a list of features in ObjectBar 2 that Stardock hopes will make it reach a new level of usefulness and popularity:

• DesktopX widgets and gadgets can be used inside of bars natively.
• Seamlessly uses your current WindowBlinds visual style
• New, simple configuration interface
• Simple skin editor for creating your own skins
• Export your creations as programs for others to use
• Full Integration with the new Stardock Virtual Desktops

We'll shortly have a guided tour of ObjectBar 2 but here are some highlights:

Simpler User interface for modifying your bars. Just pick what you want in your bar from the left and move it over into your bar.

Add DesktopX widgets or gadgets to your bars as if they're native - including alpha blending support within the bar.

Create your own skins, have it use your current WindowBlinds skin, or a skin created by someone else.

Creating skins is now a simple 5 step process. That's because it's now assumed that anyone who wants to create something really fancy would likely want to do it as a widget.  Hard core skinners can still create really fancy skins using the same methods as SkinStudio 1.6 (the skin format is just as powerful).

Full integration of the upcoming new Stardock Virtual Desktop program.

Export your creations as programs that can run on any system that has the ObjectBar run-times installed.

The Next Phase

In the next few days, release candidates of ObjectBar 2 will show up on Object Desktop.  Object Desktop is Stardock's premiere suite of desktop enhancement programs.  ObjectBar will also be available on its own. Stay tuned..

To be one of the first to see ObjectBar 2, you'll need to get Object Desktop (www.objectdesktop.com). With Object Desktop you also get DesktopX, WindowBlinds, IconPackager, and countless other programs.

Stardock has expanded its support options with the new Stardock support forums that are designed to supplement Stardock's existing News group peer user support channels.

The new forums are a derivative of the forum technology found here on WinCustomize.com but have some modifications designed to make them as fast as we can. 

They cover Stardock's complete set of products -- not just Object Desktop but the games and ThinkDesk as well.  Check them out.

Well the experiment with Firefox skins (https://www.wincustomize.com/Skins.aspx?LibID=38) finally came to an end. 

We don't remove sections on WinCustomize.com but only the most popular sections remain highlighted. Last month, 0 new skins were submitted. In fact, it's been going on 2 months since there was a new Firefox skin put in.

This paves the way for Trillian and other galleries to get a shot.

AOL Instant Messenger, MSN Instant Messenger, etc. have all kinds of interesting "goodies" that you can download of them. Avatars, Emoticons, Winks, Backgrounds, etc. And probably even more than we're thinking of.

The question is, should WinCustomize have a section to support these kinds of things? Let us know.