What a day.  So I got the the 9 missions for the Galactic Civilizations: Altarian Prophecy campaign completed today. That meant both the maps and scenarios.

I have to say, it's going to rock. Anyone who's enjoyed GalCiv in the past is almost certainly going to like having the ability to play specific maps and scenarios as well as a campaign. And I also think those players who found GalCiv to not have enough "depth" will find the scenarios to bring in enough strategic and tactical depth to really challenge them.

So that was what I spent the bulk of my time doing today. Last night I worked with Pat to fix some issues with JoeUser and did a lot of testing on the site.

I played around with a program called FolderShare which is a program very similar to one of the upcoming ThinkDesk programs. FolderShare is a nice idea that is horribly implemented. At first glance, it looks like the answer to everyone's file sharing problems. But it doesn't take long to realize that it's not really ready for prime time. Ultimately, the developers just don't "get it". They seem to be fixated with the whole file swapping mentality rather than making something that a corporation or user would want to use in a utilitarian way.  That said, given enough time users will provide them with the feedback they need to get it up to par. Which means we need to get our asses in gear with ThinkDesk because while we have a better idea, there's a lot of grunt work that needs to be done.

Getting back to GalCiv:AP, we put in the ability for sceanrios to shut down the initial minor races. This is key because many maps are balanced just right that randomly throwing on other players, even minor players, can really mess things up. I'm very pleased with how the scenarios and maps worked out.  I look forward to start play testing them next week.

I am still hopeful we can get GalCiv 1.2 out the door next week but I'm not sure. We still have to get DesktopX 2.1 done and there are still a few gotchas in our objects and such.

I really could use a vacation.

The other thing I played around with at length was our RSS reader that Adam is working on. It is coming along nicely. It just has a lot of rough edges in it. Not major things, just little things. I think one thing that would make it look a lot slicker would be DirectSkin. Give it a brushed metallic look.

The Google Ad sense stuff we've added is having good results. We may be up to making $50 per day in ads primarily from WinCustomize. This would be a nice change as that would take some of the pressure off of the various Stardock.net services which cost $15,000 per month total.  The eventual goal is to get subscriptions and ad revenue and anything else directly related to the Stardock.net service sites (wincustomize, joeuser, desktopgadgets, xpthemes.com, etc.) to pay for that $15,000 per month.  We have a long way to go. Thus far Object Desktop sales have subsidized it but we can't count on that forever.

Once we get DesktopX 2.1 out the door we can then get Object Desktop 2004 our the door soon after and that will let us focus on actual shipping products that we are very proud of. 

Meanwhile the WinCustomize browser is looking pretty sweet. I really like it but it has some minor usability issues. Let me show you what I mean:

As much as I like it. What I really wish is that the "Description" area was actually more complete.  Move the Download, apply, view comments in there with the area where those buttons were being a separator that can be adjusted. Then you can put a more fuller preview.

Basically what I am thinking would be nicer is if the "description" area was like the preview area in the Stardock Central area in terms of what it shows.  But overall it's really nice, I just am not sure if users will prefer this to just browsing the site since it's not quite as smooth an experience.

Ironically, the Stardock Central version, though lacking thse new "thumbnail" and the nice tree view feature on the left is more useful for actually browsing through skins than the WC browser in my opinion.