Like to add my wish. Please start making all new Object Desktops Windows 64bit compatible. Nothing more frustrating then to click to install a Object Desktop app and find a "not compatible...." message. Bummer!

Happy holidays too all!

I was going to say... Brad has been a huge advocate of x64 pretty much ever since it came out... I'd be really surprised if any of Object Desktop's apps didn't support it!

I am a longtime user of OD and have to say this makes me rather sad.

I personally think that OD has been going "in the wrong direction" last few years and I am not saying this to complain I still buy it and will probably upgrade even though I don't use it anymore just "because".

My thoughts on the "new" things:

WindowBlinds 7
I have been using the beta (and before that version 6) and I have completely stopped using it since it works so badly. Generally after a few days it stops "rendering" properly and the "borders" end up on the wrong z-order. It also plays terribly with many many other program s(like for instance windows live mesh). And given how windows already looks today what WB can do is no longer "magical" it is getting old, unless there is some truly groundbreaking things I have missed.

So for me: I will try it, but my guess it it will work just as poorly as 6.0 before it and thus I wont use it.

Fences Pro 1
I loved fences cool concept and 5 years ago I would have used it. But alas since I have learned to store my files in a folder under "My Documents" so there is nothing on my desktop. I seldom see the desktop as I actually run programs on my computer. Now had there been a way to create the "fences" as floating/detachable windows pointing to various folders under "my documents" it would be pretty interesting. i.e. a semitransparent "minimal" explorer window?

So for me: 5 years to late unfortunately...

DeskScapes 3
Again, the desktop?
I mean when natural desktop and aquarium desktop and that cool little toy bear came around i LOVED the concept. But now? The desktop is "layer-0" nothing you use really.

So for me: 5 years to late unfortunately...

DesktopX 4
Now this is something I have been trying to love for years and years and years, but at the end of the day you end up with the main problem as someone else also pointed out: There are no quality (last I checked) widgets for it and all the widgets work "badly" in various ways. Now if DX4 instead of scripting provided resources for scripts. For instance "my weather", "my email", "my calender" it would be mazing. But as it is now all the widgets provide that them selves which means I switch team and have to reconfigure everything (like C/F for the weather, location, etc etc). And also most widgets have very very basic features, Why is there no widget to render Google calendar nicely for instance?

So for me: The moment there is a framework to provide *MY* resources to scripts it is not of interest unfortunately...

IconPackager 5
This is I guess "ok" my problem here is that I haven't really found any particularity nice themes (and I have to be honest I haven't looked much) and I think the problem here is that there are thousands of icons so making a good theme is a pretty massive undertaking and here is where it fails.
The "new" feature is pretty cool, to be able to arbitrary change icons, but this is hardly new "microuangelo"(?) did this what 10-15 years ago?
Again the value added here could be a classification system so I would transparently change them and all my "customizations" were re-customized with the new icon-set. But I doubt this feature is in IP5 given the nature of SD product.

So for me: I might try it but I have no high hopes...

The Impulse Dock
I concur with others, why?
I already have OD+ which is by far the coolest program SD have done in a long time by the way and I would singlehandedly pay twice the subscription for a new version if it was included in OD (and yes I'll gladly pay for it stand alone as well).

So for me: I will try it but as I understand it this is not a replacement for OD+?

Tweak 7
I was wondering for ages what TweakVista was about, I am a huge fan of TweakUI (and use it for vista) but TweakVista was another beast entirely. I ended up not understanding what it did, nothing seemed useful at all (not in the easy powerful way that TweakUI was).

So for me: I am not even sure I will like Windows 7 so we shall see if I remain on XP.

Theme Manager
Interesting to see that it has the "old" UI of the year (ie. windows blinds6 UI) but I guess that for the up-coming OD 2011 it will be following along and have the "new" (which at the time will be the old UI).
All in all I guess it is nice, but I though "MyColors" also did this?

So for me: Last few times I have used MyColors to change suites as it has always been premium suites which ship inside it.

Conclusion
So the big (well, maybe not) conclusion is that this is a bit marketing ploy, every year we get a "wow, amazing new stuff happening" and every year I see that nothing new happens, yes there is a new version of WindowBlinds (and related programs) some minor updates here and there... but I also remember the "old days" we got DX, WFX (I still think this is the biggest WOW ever), EHD, OB, etc etc and said *WOW* this is soooo cool. Now days it feel more like "ohh...".
And no native 64 bit support is (and apparently also will be) common in most program which makes me wonder? I am a developer myself and it is not like it is harder to compile 64 bit applications (and not harder to write them either).

But regardless of the "ohh" in the new version I will continue using:
 - KLP (though I have switched too AutoHotKey since KLP lacks many important features)
 - Stardock Central (it launches in 1/3 the time Impulse does, though I think it will not work for much longer)
 - DriveScan (cant live without it)
 - RightClick (why ohh why cant you use it to define arbitrary popup menus for "other programs")
 - EnhancedFileDialog (this is the killer app), .

And I will continue to each year ask the question: "Why cant Stardock go back to some more productivity oriented applications?" There is a lot of cool stuff out there which can be done, especially for "power users" and if you look at what Microsoft is doing you have to see that eventually Microsoft will catch up and you will be out of business or am I missing something?

But I guess that power users don't pay as well as the customization community...

Anyways, thank you Stardock for such amazing tools, you have saved me countless of hours in front o my computer, you have amazed me with inventive new graphics things... but where will you go from here? I hope that some day I will find you again walking togther on my road...

// Michael Medin

Darn...fixed it for you...already...

Which OS are you using?

There is a well known bug in Windows XP to do with layered windows which impacts the z-order of WB per pixel skins after display changes sometimes.  Unfortunately this is outside our control, and there is no hope of Microsoft ever fixing that.

On Windows Vista / 7  you should not encounter that or anything similar (it isn't even possible)

Likewise with Windows Live Mesh, the coders of that did something incredibly stupid and the end result is they can cause explorer windows to resize to nothing if the window has a region set on it.  Again this should only impact people using WB on XP and the issue will be limited to specific skins.  Some 3rd party msstyles will also suffer the same problem and it is even possible to trigger the issue without anything custom running.  We have reported this to them on a number of occasions.

Where did this idea come from that the apps would not support 64 bit?

There is no point making say the UI for WB 64 bit as it would just bloat up the installer, but the bits that need to be 64 bit are 64 bit on 64 bit OSes.

Things like SKS will remain 32 bit on all platforms as there is no gain to the user with there being a 64 bit version of the exe.  Its not like it needs more than 2GB RAM or would gain anything from the additional registers.