My 15 minutes of fame got a boost this week when I was on MSNBC's show with Lester Holt to pimp The Political Machine. It was the same weird stare into the camera with only an ear piece without being able to see the other person. But it went well. With the race so close, it's not surprising sales have been so strong on it and it's gotten so much attention.
There's a post-mortem up now on how The Political Machine was made and it's created quite a buzz because of how quickly it was made and on how low a budget. The secret? DesktopX. We used it to create the user interface for the game and then have our DirectX engine read in .dxpacks. It's pretty amazing stuff that no other game developer really has (even Blizzard would be hard pressed to create a DesktopX type product strictly for game development).
Meanwhile, we've decided to start trying to share a piece of the pie with skin authors here on WinCustomize. Starting probably in the next 24 to 72 hours the authors of the top 10 new (non-ported) WindowBlinds skins will start getting a percentage of WinCustomize subscription sales. The goal - encourage the creation of more high quality skins and encourage users to subscribe to the site.
Some people may have noticed that Paul Boyer's Orion icon suite got a major update with every single icon enhanced to have a 128x128 version which will make ObjectDock users happy. He has also finished, after a year of work, the Utopia icon suite which will be available for sale in the next couple of weeks. It's very awesome and I hope to have some preview shots up soon.
Meanwhile, Stardock has decided to begin really beefing up Object Desktop's productivity features now that the customization portions have really matured. Expect to see three new components in the coming months: Enhanced File Dialog, PowerTune, and Web Explorer. One new component, RightClick, has entered beta. Yea, it's still pretty rough. But it holds a lot of promise. It combines both productivity and skinning together.
Speaking of web stuff, check out the new Google desktop search stuff. Google has brought its powerful search features to your own computer. It's really fantastic. I was able to find long lost documents. And the potential for this thing is amazing. Stardock has big plans with this stuff in the coming year or two as it explores its possibilities.