Last night I came home early so that I could focus on the Object Desktop 2004 documentation. It's finally finsihed or at least good enough to go up on Stardock Central. 120 or so pages of "stuff". And it only covers 5 major components of Object Desktop. But still, it's far better than what we previously had -- NOTHING.

I need to take Martin's excellently done SkinStudio documentation and make it available as a stand alone PDF document. Very pleased with how that turned out even if the examplle skin he made was horrendous!

This morning the roads were nasty and since I actually get more done at home than at work and WinCustomize Magazine is going out on the work machine, I figured I'd stay home and try to get things done here.

Spent about 2 hours talking to Jeff today about ObjectBar 2. It's coming along nicely but there's still a lot more to go, especially on the skinning issue. ObjectBar 2 is what will be replacing ControlCenter other than the virtual desktops and even that is open for discussion depending on royalty discussions with Andy. I would rather keep the existing virtual desktops Andy's made but I need to get the royalty reduced on that component to do it. CC has just not kept up with the times and ObjectBar 2 will deliver on what we've been wanting to do.

We also discussed Keyboard LaunchPad. It is one of the best programs we make but its sales have been terrible. We've learned some lessons from it but they're not ones I like having learned: Flash sells a lot better than meat. How bad has KLP sold? 6 copies this month. Just terrible. I don't understand because this is the kind of program EVERY user should have on their system.

Then we went on to ObjectDock Plus. We have a freeware program called ObjectDock. Very popular. ObjectDock Plus would have a ton of new features in it. We'd sell it for like $10. The problem has to do with the cost of it.

Most people dont' realize that this skinning stuff doesn't sell that great in general. Some of it does. But most of it sells in relatively low quantities. People ask, why does Stardock dominate the market? Because we have no other choice. In order to actually be in this market in a commercial sense you've gotta have dozens of programs. Each one sells relatively small numbers of units but combined you get serious income. And Object Desktop is the whole thing put togethr. No other developer at this stage in the software market could put together an Object Desktop type product for $50. Even we have trouble maintaining that price point.

Then I moved onto the main project of the day - getting things ready for DesktopX 2.1. Fastest way a co-worker can annoy me: Give the impression that some task is beneath them. Because I spent a good portion of my day going through the DesktopX library trying out nearly every object to make sure it works with DesktopX 2.1. We're talking very very slow, long, and tedious work. But someone has to do it.

And boy, did I discover some huge issues:

1) DesktopX 2.1 beta doesn't work correctly with flash objects!!! You can't get mouse clicks to them or something.

2) DesktopX 2.1 changes the Z-order handling of ActiveX controsl which breaks cases where the ActiveX control is supposed to be below another object.

3) DeskotpX 2.1 has a problem where ActiveX controls turn black when they are combined with other objects in a group.

On the good side, the media player object is working great!

So out of the literallly hundreds of objects I downloaded I tried I picked a couple dozen that would be part of the default install. Most of them created by Martin (good job Martin!). We're still close to getting DesktopX 2.1 done but I don't think it'll happen this week. And we need to get DX 2.1 done to release Object Desktop 2004 and we need to get Object Desktop 2004 out to realy get the marketing going along with releasing UniverseMetal 2004 and the Fish Tank theme.

Also talked to Joe on how to handle issues and the interviews with the press. That worked out well. Joe's joining Stardock has really helped things in many ways but one way it changed things in a big way is the philosphy of building TOOLS to create game content rather than messing around with text files (Where we'd always make some mistake). Way to go Joe!

Getting ready to take a break and start up again after Dinner. Also wrote the prediction for the New Hampshire primary for PoliticalMachine.com