Remember Microsoft Bob? Alex G, one of Stardock's graphics designers, took a break from working on Galactic Civilizations to create this modern rendition of Microsoft Bob using DesktopX.

Normally, the top skin authors have 3,000 downloads or so.

Yesterday, the top 3 skin authors had 17,000 downloads of their skins in a single day.

Today's stats won't be quite that impressive since we were down 6 hours due to the power outage in Livonia (the UPS's worked long enough for us to do an orderly shut down at least) but I bet the numbers are pretty high.

Mormegil's 7,120 skin downloads in a day is staggering though. Treetog getting almost 7,000 is also incredible. The community is certainly growing as fast as the bandwidth.

That said, we're almost certainly going to have to soon require accounts to download after the user has downloaded 1 megabyte of skins. This way a casual user can still try out some skins without an account but after a megabyte they'll need an account.

The skin authors who are creating these incredible things should be proud of their accomplishments.

If, for instance, Mormegil or Treetog's skins were an application, in 7 days they would have 50,000 downloads. This would make them in the top 50 most popular downloads on C-net.

In a month, 200,000 or the size of a medium sized city.

Now finally the question - are these massive download numbers due to more peopel being in the community or because the quality of skins over the past couple of years has increased? Or some other reason?

So where did that traffic come from?

1) Stardock: 68% (up from 63% las month)
2) DeskMod: 7% (down from 11% from last month)
3) DeviantArt: 2.8% (same as last month)
4) LotsOfSkins: 1.5% (down from 2%)

T-shirts are in manufacturing and should be available soon. That and the CDs should hopefully offset the costs of the site.

With CD sales, we were about $3,600 over budget for the month so we still need to find a way to generate an additional $3,600 per month to pay for the increased band width.

The only scarey thing is that if traffic were to increase this month, we'd max out the bandwidth.

We are probably going to have to institute steps to decrease bandwidth use fairly soon unless the shirts and CDs do pretty well. This will likely come in the form of limiting downloads for those who haven't created accounts to 5 megabytes (or even requiring accounts to download). The next step would be to require users who are downloading many megabytes of WB skins or icon packages and Desktopx themes to at least be registered usres. I.e. if you've downloaded 20 MEGABYTES of WindowBlinds skins but you haven't registered WindowBlinds or bought Object Desktop, that's obviously a bad thing.

We don't expect anything significant to happen in August, we actually expect traffic to decline as August is one of the slowest months of the year due to vacations and such so hopefully the T-shirts will make up the difference. We only have to sell 300 T-shirts per month (0.15% of the monthly uniques) to stay on budget (Stardock gives us a $5,000 grant per month to gaurantee that this site will always be here, but we're currently spending $10,000 per month).

This month's new section is Convergence. It'll probably be the last new section we add for a bit (until bandwidth is under control).

We're very happy with how things are going though. Afterall, the only reason why bandwidth is even an issue is because the site has grown so much.

Convergence is the part of Stardock's Object Desktop that ties all the programs together.

It allows users to create true "skins suites" called Skin packs. A skin pack is a collection of icons, skins, and themes put together into a single file. When applied, Convergence communicates with your installed programs and directs them to change their various skins to the ones in the skin pack.

So a user wanting to have a particular overall look to Windows would simply apply a single Convergence skin pack instead of having to go to WinAmp, ICQPlus, WindowBlinds, DesktopX, ObjectBar, IconPackager, CursorEx, NeXTStart, etc. and manually load the appropriate files.

In short, Convergence combes the strength of your installed skinnable software into a single super theme.

It is currently only available on Stardock's Object Desktop (www.objectdesktop.com).

So in years past were any of you OS bigots? I was a major OS/2 fanatic from 1991-1996. I lived and breathed OS/2 during those days. Hard to believe one could get so much into a piece of software.

So how the heck did you get into computers in the first place?

When did the illness begin?

For me, I started off playing video games on my dad's Apple II (which now lives in our basement). And got my own C-64 for Christmas. It was all down hill from there...

Okay, the site's been a bit slow for the past couple weeks due to increased traffic.

The good news is that we have just upgraded the SQL server to a dual 1Ghz machine that's on a DS3 line so things should be much much faster.

There is still, of coruse, the issue that the pages are 60K in HTML with lots of graphics (100K total) so things can be slower for modem users but hopefully those users are taking advantage of the optimize for speed features and we will be working to find ways to make the pages be smaller without compromising the aesthetics.

Our first T-shirt goes to manufacturing this week. The design is by Flipnet. The shirts will be on sale for the first month for only $12 apiece! Proceeds from the shirts will go to pay for the bandwidth running this site! We should have the shirts ready for sale within the next 2 weeks!

Stardock has released an update to DesktopX that addresses some problems found when running it on Windows 98 and Windows ME. Click on the link to get the latest version.

A true shift in the balance of power of skinning -- Mormegil's submissions have put him at the highest ranking skin author for the past few days straight.

This is significant because it's the first time since the site began that the leader didn't come from WindowBlinds.

Mormegil was an early supporter of DesktopX and now literally tens of thousands of people are learning what many of us have appreciated for a long time - Paul (Mormegil) is an incredibly talented designer, artist, and animator.

Way to go Mormegil! When it comes to creative animated things, even Feanor would be humbled by your efforts!