Isn't one of the selling points of console games versus PC games that the console games are less buggy? That hasn't been my experience so far and right now, I'm pretty exasperated by it.

I'm enjoying the new Knights of the Old Republic game. I played the first one on my PC and loved it so much that I bought an Xbox pretty much to get this game. But it's glitchy.

Tonight I hit the biggest glitch yet, a game ending one. I escaped from the the planet Telos and as it loaded up the next screen it turned blank. Blank. Pitch black. I could get to the various menus including the map which looks corrupted or something. And I can ear the sounds around me. But I'm in a black void.

I save often when I'm in a dangerous situation but had not been saving in the area I had been because I was in no danger so I literally lost about 3 hours of game time as a result -- and there's no garauntee this won't happen again for all I know.

Sigh.

With the end of the year upon us, it's time for this year's "The State of Skinning" message. At least in terms of how we see it.  For the nearly million new registered users who may be reading this, I should probably provide a little background before going into the meat of this.

Skinning is a general concept of changing the way your computer's interface looks and feels. And in the beginning, there were two websites dedicated to this. One was called Customize.org and the other Skinz.org.  When the Dot-Com hype collapsed, the advertising revenue that powered much of the Internet disappeared taking those sites with them.  At the time, the only significant general customization site around was the new deviantART.com.  So Stardock decided that it couldn't exclusively rely on third party sites for providing the content its software customers wanted. The result was the launch of WinCustomize in March of 2001. 

Eventually, Customize.org and Skinz.org returned but under new owners and much about them has changed since then. Other sites have come as well and the problem other skin sites have run into is money. That is, if the website gets too popular, it becomes too expensive to maintain.  WinCustomize.com receives a monthly grant from Stardock plus it gets income from people who subscribe to the site.  We have remained exclusively customization site.  Our friends at deviantART took the path of becoming a general art site. They do have a healthy customization section though that I recommend you check out.

And that's where we are today. So how did this year go?

The Lawsuit

Well, the year started out with a nasty lawsuit that I think permanently changed the community.  Developer TGT Soft filed a lawsuit a week before last Christmas demanding that Stardock allow it to use its IconPackager .iptheme format without having to license it. Needless to say, we weren't too happy about that. We felt it went to a core issue of skinning - if you want to use someone else's "stuff" you need their permission to do it. Several months later the suit was settled out of court and TGT Soft ended up having to license the format for Stardock (the details of which are confidential per the settlement). So it was good news, in our view, for the skinning community.

The GUI Olympics

There was also the GUI Olympics this year. It had Winamp, IconPackager, and WindowBlinds as the 3 sponsored programs.  ATI helped out a lot and it was a great success. But there won't ever be another one. Why? Because the US Olympic committee demanded that we not use the phrase Olympics so future ones will have to be called GUI Championships (one lawsuit is enough per year thanks ).

Triumph of Rainlendar / SysMetrix

2004 was also a year of consolidation. Widgets got talked about a lot and the net effect is that the widget programs gobbled up the user base of a ton of small one purpose programs. There's still a Beatnik section on WinCustomize.com. And it still gets new submissions. But the widget programs (DesktopX, Kapsules, etc.) have taken a bite out of the momentum of specialty programs because they can do so much. But there were two notable exceptions to this - SysMetrix and Rainlendar.  SysMetrix lets people build system monitors really easily. And Rainlendar is a really nice skinned calendar program. The widget programs haven't touched them.

Year of the Widget

But while those exceptions have thrived, there's no denying that 2004 was the year of the widget. Konfabulator came out for Windows with much anticipation. DesktopX 2.x made widget creation very easy. Avedesk rose to become a popular program. Samurize (which Stardock hosts) grew in popularity. Kapsules came into existence and made headway (and its developer will be a full time Stardock developer here in Michigan starting in January).   You can see what they're all about in the Widget Wars article.  But the jury is out whether widgets are going to become mainstream. I can tell you that right now, they're most definitely not mainstream. They're like where skins were in 1999. Consider these numbers: Konfabulator, with a perfect storm of publicity (News.com, slashdot, etc.) has a download count (non-unique users) on its widgets whose mean is around 1500.  DesktopX's widgets have a mean download on new stuff of around 500 and the other widget enablers considerably less than that (when there are download counts to measure).  By contrast, a typical new WindowBlinds skin can get 2000 downloads in an afternoon. So the widget detractors (i.e. the people who get on me for covering widgets so much) have a point - they've gotten much more publicity than their popularity warrants.  That said, I still love em. Still gonna make them. And still think they're the next "big thing" in customization.

WindowBlinds Victorious

More time than I would like to admit goes into monitoring download statistics on various content on various sites as well as the creation of new content for various programs. It's graphed out. It's analyzed. It's projected. Some skin sites are less accurate than others in terms of their downloads (some sites increment downloads on a skin if you just look at it funny on the page. Other sites only count completed downloads. And still other use cookies and account tying so that even if you re-download a skin it will only count that as 1 download total -- that's what WinCustomize does).

So I can say that while it was a close thing in 2001 and 2002, this past year WindowBlinds skins became far more dominant than msstyles in terms of # of new skins made as well as (to the best we can tell) number of active users.  There's some good msstyles out there but 2004 wasn't a good year for them. It's as if the msstyle community collectively decided that Longhorn and "Royale" were "good enough".  That isn't to say there weren't some good msstyles made -- there were. But they were far far more uncommon than in 2001/2002 (decline started in 2003 and accelerated in 2004).  And next year Longhorn will show up and msstyles won't work on there (if there's a "msstyle" format on Longhorn it'll be a new format entirely almost certainly).

So the lynchpin of what makes WinCustomize.com so popular grew in popularity in 2004. Partially sparked by the GUI Olympics, 2004 saw a lot more creativity in skins as well as simply "more" skins over 2003.

Critical mass for Object Desktop

2004 was the year that Object Desktop's user base soared at an astounding rate.  Our basic belief on this is that enough of the programs that make up this suite of desktop enhancement utilities matured to the point of being ready for the mass market that people started buying it in higher numbers than before.

The Docks

Some people really hate commercialism in skinning. But one thing that can't be denied - free things tend to disappear and non-free things tend to keep being developed.  There were 3 docks at one point..  All 3 very good programs.  All 3 freeware.   One of the 3 free ones got a letter from Apple and disappeared. The other stopped being updated. We got a letter too but we have lawyers. 

But ObjectDock came out with a "Plus" version this year. And updates for it have continued. In fact, ObjectDock Plus now rivals WindowBlinds in terms of sales popularity. The tabbed dock is here to stay.  The free one will continue to be free and continue to be updated. But it's clear from user screenshots that having tabs on the dock is the way to go.

WinCustomize 2K5

For months it was in development. And this month it finally was launched. The first major overhaul of WinCustomize.com since its original launch back in 2001. The first two weeks were very bumpy. Which is why the official announcement won't go out until this Monday.  But things have improved greatly since then and each day new features and tweaks get made to it. 

The results have been good.  According to Site Meter, the site was averaging around 440,000 visitors per day.  Now it's already up to 540,000 visitors per day average. That's 100,000 more visitors per day!

Paying the bills

WinCustomize is still very dependent on that monthly Stardock grant.  But WinCustomize subscriptions have made the difference.  Without subscribers, there would have been no WinCustomize 2K5 which cost around $90,000 just in IT costs so far.  We'll probably have another subscription drive in January to help buy some new servers to help keep the site growing.  The way the new site was coded will save us substantially on hardware and enable the site to grow much faster without straining the resources so much.

So what's next?

I can't predict what 2005 will be like. The Longhorn beta will show up in late Spring and we'll know how that impacts skinning.  In theory, Longhorn should be a huge windfall for customization. It includes a compositor which means you can do a lot more visual stuff that is hardware accelerated.  So that could be very exciting if they keep is open enough for third parties to get in there and expand on what's there.

I think you'll see more premium suites. The demand for these is very high. Natural Desktop (www.naturaldesktop.com) has done incredibly well. So has Aquarium Desktop. So I think you'll see an increase in these kinds of things next year.

I think 2005 will be a very exciting year because of Longhorn bringing interest and the community features on WinCustomize helping people participate in more ways.

Widgets will grow more popular I think. With ObjectBar 2 supporting widgets being embedded in bars, I think that'll have a big impact.

So that's where things stand from our perspective. Tell us what you think is going to be big in 2005. 

Our friends at TweakXP have a top sites vote. You can vote for WinCustomize by going here:

http://topsites.tweakxp.com/rankem.asp?id=1063

Thanks!

Only a few more days left until Christmas vacation! My wife and I and sons (Alex pictured here) are pretty excited about the whole thing.

We're really excited to visit with friends and family during the holidays. I've got copies of Knights of the Old Republic, Pirates, and World of Warcraft to keep me busy.  My son Alex has a 7th level character running around WoW these days too.

No matter where you are though, we hope you have a Merry Christmas. Have a great time these next couple of weeks. I hope to have time to write a lot more during that time too.

In my Christmas letter I talked about liberal Democrats fleeing to Canada to escape "Jesus Land".  I've talked to some family members and friends who weren't familiar with this reference. So for those of them that visit my blog, here's what I was referring to:

Shortly after the election a bunch of far left wing bloggers and journalists started claiming that the only reason why Bush won is because the "Jesus Freaks" came out in force to vote for Bush. And so in their view we have a divided country with one side being "rational, thoughtful, intelligent" people who should break off and hook up with Canada and the other side a bunch of "moronic, reactionary religious nuts who are too blind to recognize what a Nazi Bush is" who should just form their own country and call it "jesus land".

And a John Kerry supporter then created this map to lampoon conservatives. I thought it was pretty funny but not for the same reasons. Where the Kerry supporters seemed to think it spoke a lot more proof, conservatives, such as myself who aren't even religious, found it amusing in demonstrating that those partiuclarly liberals just don't have a clue why they lost. So I decided to refer to it in my letter.

In my Christmas letter, I overestimated how many people had heard of this thing. They thought I had made up the concept of "Jesus Land" and map. I didn't.  I was poking fun at far left wing people who had crudely tried to stereotype Bush voters.

As online-game companies court new and wider audiences, many are running into an old problem: "griefers," a small but seemingly irradicable set of players who want nothing more than to murder, loot and otherwise frustrate the heck out of everyone else.

Social miscreants can do more than ruin the game for better-behaved competitors. They can hurt game companies' bottom line by driving away customers and burning up support lines. Problems related to grief players often account for 25 percent or more of customer service calls, according to game publishers.

Now an increasing number of companies are fighting back, using a combination of technology, sociology and psychology to limit griefer damage. Success could be important to the industry's growth, as companies seek to expand beyond the audience of hard-core players to more casual customers, many of whom are unlikely to tolerate bad experiences for long.

Read the whole thing from CNET's News.com

I get flamed. A lot.  In fact, as time goes on, I find I get flamed even in places I'm not.

For example, tonight I came across a link to an interview with Arlo Rose, the author of Konfabulator. While reading the comments, someone wrote a a response challenging why Konfabulator should get so much attention.  And the owners of the site claimed that the anonymous user was me. Apparently I am all knowing and all powerful and exist on every obscure website on the net.

Besides the usual annoyance of being falsely accused of doing something I consider pretty repugnant (those who know me know how I feel about anonymous detractors so being accused of doing that sort of thing is a double whammy). It really demonstrates that, at least in the customization community, that there are enough people that dislike me and what I do that they'll start believing I'm responsible for all the bad things out there.

In the OS/2 world, I still get brought up on occasion as a boogey man. Even this month on the Usenet group comp.os.os2.advocacy there were people blaming me (or Stardock) for destroying OS/2 (ah the power of google to find this stuff).  Apparently I am quite powerful.

In a single day I've seen myself blamed for buggy code in a Windows game, an OS/2 process killing utility, and a Widows desktop enhancement program while at the same time helping spread "FUD" about Linux and undermining the Mac market with our software that lets Windows users make Windows look like whatever they want. 

But the thing is, I'm just one guy. And while I try to keep track of a lot of things, I only know what's going on in a few selected places. Heck, I don't even know what's happening in the forums on JoeUser.com most of the time and that's supposedly my blog site.  That's why I get so incredulous when I get accused of having some influence or action in some obscure place like some website I rarely visit or some operating system I haven't used in 5 years or whatever.

Being falsely accused of something really bugs me. And and false accusations such as the one described here happen pretty regularly. It's almost like they want to pretend that they are worth more attention than they deserve.  But anyone who knows me at all knows that I don't shy away from criticizing things as myself. I take my lumps. Hence why I have so many detractors in the first place. <g>

Over the course of this year, I'll probably be decreasing my visibility markedly.  For one thing, I'm just tired of getting flamed. My thick skin is pretty ragged from constant flaming. We recently hired a net community liason who will slowly be interacting more with the whole desktop enhancement community. I'll probably eventually only frequent sites I have admin access of some kind which can put a quick end to those who want to impugn me.

Software developer Stardock has released a significant update to DesktopX today.  The world's most popular widget enabling program has found competition growing from programs such as Konfabulator, Avedesk and others.

While those programs do not support DesktopX's ability to build complete desktops and distribute them, they do support a robust "widget" architecture. Widgets in the desktop customization market are mini-programs that are designed to reside on your desktop. Where the desktop was once the exclusive home to icons, widgets (and DesktopX objects) allow users to extend the desktop functionality of Windows.

DesktopX widgets can be brought to the front with a function key (default is F9) or hidden entirely until needed (default is F10). But DesktopX widgets were previously not very configurable by end users. If a user wanted to change the color or tweak the shadow or even the Z-order, the user had to load DesktopX, import the widget, make the changes, and then re-export them.  With version 2.4, users can go to the properties of the DesktopX widget and change them directly.

"One of the key advantages DesktopX has over other widget-enabling programs is that DesktopX widgets are EXEs that can be run without running DesktopX.  However, many users requested the ability to be able to modify how those widgets functioned without having to import them into the DesktopX environment.  We consider 2.4 really the start on this journey," said Brad Wardell, Product Manager of DesktopX at Stardock. "Future versions will add labeling, and plugin configurability right into the context menu. Eventually a DesktopX widget will have all the advantages of a stand along program while using a fraction of the memory and resources that a typical stand alone program uses."

DesktopX 2.4 is a free download. Stardock provides an enhanced version that supports premium widgets as well as the ability to export content as widgets.  The enhanced version is available stand alone or as part of Stardock's overall suite of desktop enhancement utilities called Object Desktop.

Visit www.desktopx.net to get the new version of DesktopX.

Stardock has released an updated version of its popular desktop enhancement utility, DesktopX.

DesktopX 2.4 allows users to customize their widgets. Each widget has its own properties dialog that enables users to tweak the widget’s z-order, transparency, shadow, color, and whether it automatically runs on start-up or not.

Stardock also added in a host of user suggestions such as widgets saving their position, a cleaner, simpler configuration for DesktopX global settings, and includes an updated DXPlayer which allows users to remote control iTunes, Windows Media Player, ObjectMedia, Winamp and other popular media players from a widget or DesktopX object.

DesktopX is a revolutionary program that lets you enhance your Windows desktop by adding widgets, themes, animated icons, and much more to it. It is part of Stardock's Object Desktop suite of Windows customization utilities.

The program works by extending the Windows desktop to support live objects. These objects can be put together to make “widgets” (mini-applications) or used to build entire desktops. Since DesktopX itself has little overhead, users have total flexibility to decide how much or how little to change your Windows PC with it.

DesktopX has been used to create things ranging from MP3 players, calendars, PC game auto-start programs, computer interfaces in the movies, aquariums, kiosks, and much more.

DesktopX is a free download. Users can upgrade to an enhanced version which adds support for premium widgets and objects, desktop security, and widget creation. The enhanced version is available stand-alone for $19.95 or can be purchased as part of Object Desktop for $49.95. For more information visit http://www.desktopx.net