I came home from vacation early. Higgins Lake is great...when it's not raining and when it's not cold. I have a dream of going on vacation for 2 weeks each year.  I went one a one week vacation earlier this summer and that went well but the Higgins Lake thing was a bust weather-wise. But we still had a good time.  Just as well though, The Political Machine got released while we were gone and should be at a store near you if you're in the United States. If you check out this week's Time Magazine you'll see an article about the game along with a quote from me (Brad Wardell). So there is some consolation I guess.

One little secret about The Political Machine: The entire user interface was designed with DesktopX.  In fact, the game itself just reads in .dxpacks and we developed a 3D engine that reads them and runs them as you would expect in a full screen Direct3D game.

The big news this week is that ObjectDock Plus is finally done.  We're releasing both the Plus version and the freeware 1.04 version at the same time. We want to make sure people realize that just because there's a plus version that we're not abandoning the freeware version.  We expect to keep making updates to both of them for a long time to come.

And we're still trying to get DesktopX 2.2 out the door. If you have Object Desktop,  you already have the latest release candidate of it.  Check out some of the cool widgets & objects for it. For those not familiar with the difference, widgets are mini-programs. They don't require that you have DesktopX even running, just installed on your computer (so that they can use DirectGUI.dll).  DesktopX objects, by contrast, run as part of the DesktopX environment so you can get your setup just so and save the entire desktop as a theme.  The better DesktopX content comes in both forms so you can decide which you want to use.  I am partial to the widgets myself but the downside of widgets is that you can't tweak them beyond what the original author had in mind where as objects can be totally customized. Hopefully when DesktopX 2.2 gets to be out of beta you'll see an explosion of high quality widgets and objects as well as themes.