A busy November week at Stardock

It's been an insane week this week at Stardock. Insane. Cats and dogs living together and everything. For this reason, I'm sending this to you to let you know what's been going on.

Monday

On Monday, Stardock announced a new graphics design team called Stardock Design. It pulls together skinners from SkinPlant and Pixtudio and combines them together.  The idea is to start making skinning much more mainstream and the first thing that was released with it was a branded desktop for Florida State University. A ton of other things are in the works too. If you're reading this, you're probably one of the people who were at the forefront of the cutting edge of desktop customization -- skinning.

Stardock Design also created a consumer oriented suite called Texas Holdem. You definitely should check this out because not only does the suite have a WindowBlinds skin, icon package, boot screen, and logon screen it also has a card game gadget!

Stardock Design: https://www.stardockdesign.com

Texas Holdem: https://www.stardock.com/products/themes/texasholdem/

Tuesday

Tuesday was the day that ObjectDock 1.5 was released. This was the most significant update to ObjectDock since it was originally released. If you have Object Desktop, you can get ObjectDock at a discount.

The new version of ObjectDock supports .Dockzips, has a new resizing algorithm that's faster, works on Windows Vista, has a new image search feature, screen edge reserving, tons of new drag and drop features, and dozens of other features and tweaks.

If you haven't ever tried ObjectDock, give it a shot. It's second only to WindowBlinds in terms of popularity. Last week it passed the 3 millionth download mark on CNET.

ObjectDock home page: http://www.objectdock.com

ObjectDock 1.5 Guided Tour: https://www.wincustomize.com/Articles.aspx?AID=136176

Wednesday

WindowBlinds for Windows Vista was the main event of Wednesday. This came in the form of WindowBlinds 5.5 BETA (5.49 on Stardock Central). As a beta, it's only available to Object Desktop users. Not too many people have Windows Vista yet but if you do, this is the first (and only) way to change the way Windows Vista looks and feels. It makes full use of the new Windows Vista compositor for maximum performance. 

If you have WindowBlinds stand-alone, you can upgrade to Object Desktop at a discount by going to the link below.

Object Desktop Home Page: http://www.objectdesktop.com

Upgrade to Object Desktop from WindowBlinds: https://www.stardock.com/products/odnt/odnt-upgrade.asp

WindowBlinds 5.5 Guided Tour: https://www.wincustomize.com/articles.aspx?AID=136284

Thursday

On Thursday, the beta for Galactic Civilizations II: Dark Avatar was released. There's far too many new features to list here but if you have Galactic Civilizations II, you'll definitely want to check this out. If you don't have Galactic Civilizations II, you can get it at your local store or you can get it at the Galactic Civilizations II home page.

The expansion pack beta is available to anyone who has pre-ordered the expansion pack. This way, players can help give feedback on what sorts of changes and tweaks they'd like before it's released.

Galactic Civilizations II home page: https://www.galciv2.com

Dark Avatar expansion home page: https://www.galciv2.com/darkavatar

Friday

And of course there's Friday. And on Friday Stardock released the Aquarium Desktop 2007.  Aquarium Desktop is similar to those fish screen savers you see seemingly everywhere except these fish exist on your Windows desktop and you can interact with them (grab them, move them around, open chests, move plants around, etc.).  It's been designed to keep from using up very much CPU when covered up so that it doesn't get in the way of your work.

As a bonus, Aquarium Desktop 2007 comes with a brand new very cool WindowBlinds skin. If you have an older version, there are some great discounts to getting the new one.

Aquarium Desktop Home Page: https://www.stardock.com/products/aquarium/

Screenshots: https://www.stardock.com/products/aquarium/screenshots.asp

The end of the week...

And now it's the end of the week. The insanity is over. If you're reading this you already know that Stardock's a relatively small company. We're located up in Plymouth Michigan. Typically, a company like ours would have one product that we just update every year. We should be making some sort of insurance application or maybe a data manager or something that we release minor updates each year. That's what a normal software company of our size would be doing. 

If you are interested in talking to anyone from Stardock in person, feel free to visit us on #stardock on irc.stardock.com (you can reach it through Stardock Central).  You can also interact with us on the Stardock forums.

Stardock Corp. 15090 Beck Rd. Plymouth MI 48170. www.stardock.com.