Meetings eat up increasingly greater amounts of my time. In a theoretical 8 hour day today, I spent 4 hours of them in meetings. That leaves 4 hours to do actual "work". Widgets to do: [X] IconPackager Media Guide finished/checked/printed [X] Went over JoeUser.com and featured some articles [X] GalCiv Beta testing [X] GalCiv Beta went up (not really any work on my part, just had to press the trigger) [X] DesktopX 2.1 testing [X] GalCiv screenshots [X] IconPackager PR. Meetings: ...

So I got WinCustomize magazine done. It took quite a bit of work. The work not only derives itself from the actual writing but the research for it. Two big things I do in the magazines is sift through all the...well crap that gets submitted and have to narrow things down to highlighting 30 or so skins and themes to show off. That means I have to skip over a lot of good stuff too which is a bummer but I have to focus on things that casual users will want, not just power users. With >800,000 Wi...

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 tac...

To organize the site better for future growth, we have implemented topics (sub-categories). There will be nested sub-topics as well.What we want to do is decrease the # of channels overall and instead let users post into those fewer channels on a wider range of topics. Users interested in those topics will be able to delve deeper and deeper into that category by going to a particular topic.Let me give you an example:Let's say you're really into history. You click on the history forum or channel ...

I can't say I'm happy overall with the company's progress. It's no one's fault. It was just so many things are interconnected that it was bound that things would get off track. We got IconPackager 2.5 out which has the smarter packaging in it and the encrypted format so that we can protect our intellectual property better from quasi-warez companies. We then followed that up with IconDeveloper. Which we followed up with BootSkin. But it has bene DesktopX 2.1, the hugely ambitious upd...

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 examp...

This month we're going to put some extra effort to improve our forum experience.  One of the big things is the move to a clustered server back end which should dramatically improve the performance of our sites. Below is a bug report on some of the things I've run across on our forums recently.   #1 Number of users on the forums The forum statistics don't make any sense to me.  I know there's a lot more people on these forums than that because of the s...

Untitled Page Win Customize.com Magazine November 2006    What's in this issue GUI Championships Wraps Up WindowBlinds Beta For Vista ObjectDock 1.5 Released Skinner of the Month Beta Test WinCustomize 2007 November Skinning Highlights More Premium Content Available Articles of Note WinCustomize Sponsored Podcasts GUI Championships Wraps Up The end of Novemb...

At 4PM EST (which is about 35 minutes from now) we will be having a Stardock conference on #stardock on the IRC server irc.stardock.com. Users can go into the #questions channel to ask questions and then those questions will be relayed over to #stardock where Stardock's development team will be answering them. The topics of discussion are primarily DesktopX 3, DesktopX 3 Pro, and Multiplicity.  But other topics are open for discussion as well. Hope to see you there!

The JoeUser.com media guide is now up. You can see what the advantages and features of JoeUser.com are.

We've been working on the Blog Navigator for a few months now. We've been on the net and found various RSS readers out there but they always seemed to lack something. If only we could combine all the best features of them together.  So that's where the Blog Navigator comes in. We're going to release a free version that just works on JoeUser.com. But the enhanced version, which will be $19.95, will help support the site and allow users to interact with any site with RSS feeds. But it ...

I didn't accomplsih as much as I had hoped today. Lots of busy work. As my friend and co-worker Kris would say, too many things in the oven. Did spend some time on The Political Machine. Now that it's up and running on my laptop (stayed up until 4am on that and still had to go into the office) I'll be able to work on it more. JoeUser is up to nearly 80 new articles today. I am hoping we will be able to officially launch the site in early March. Still a few more features we gotta have in th...

I didn't realize that the newer laptop didn't have Visual Stuido. In fact, it doesn't have development tools on it in general! Having gotten in at 11am I spent most of the day pouring through email, getting DesktopX 2.1 announced, and taking care of various "biz stuff". At 9pmish I got home and started on getting the laptop ready which included downloading the 200+ meg DirectX 9 SDK. Good grief it's huge. And stupid too as it it's just a bit self extracting EXE with an installer in it. Woul...

I've lost quite a bit of time this week m igrating to Outlook. I am sure it'll be wonderful when I finsih but in the meantime it's been a major pain. The main issue with it has been moving the hundreds of thousands of emails I've received in Outlook Express over the past 4 years over to it. I took advantage of my not-completely-fair flex time to simply go home while the migration took place which took several hours to read in all the files and then remove the tens of thousands of duplicates. ...

So what do you do during your evenings? Me, I hunt around the various Stardock websites looking for problems. Yea, I have no life.  Our sites and servers are growing and evolving so fast that we often miss things. Here's what I found tonight... #1 CSS on Demigod journal messed up. Blog post the cause or something else?   #2 The Demigod pre-order page Well first, we need to standardize on our description of Demigod.  Demigod is an action R...