Stardock Magazine

February 2020

by Brad Wardell

## Contents ##

• Editiorial: State of Mobile Computing
• SoundPackager Preview
• The Political Machine 2020

Editorial: The state of mobile computing

This past year has been really exciting for those of us who spend a lot of time using mobile devices.  Below, in no particular order, is my two-cents on where things stand.

Surface Pro X

The Surface Pro X is Microsoft’s latest tablet convertible.  The Surface Pro 7 is my primary mobile computing device. The Pro X uses an ARM64 processor.  You can read Neowin’s review here.  Both Rich at Neowin and Daniel at Windows Central love it.  If it cost half as much, I’d love it, too.  But it’s just objectively inferior to the Surface Pro 7 and costs about the same. 

MacBook Pro 16

My other portable device of choice is the new MacBook Pro. They finally fixed the keyboard issue and it’s pretty awesome.  I wish it was built on Icelake which has modern sleep support built into the chip, but it’s pretty amazing nevertheless. However, for something that relies so heavily on dongles, it’s pretty finicky at times for me depending on the USB-C hub I’m using.

Edge Chromium

Edge Chromium makes it easy and useful to turn a web page into an app.

Here’s an example of a website, Jira, turned into an app:

Here’s how you do it.

Go to your favorite website with Edge Chromium:

Then, click on the dots on the top right and choose 'install app.'

This process also creates an icon on your desktop for the app.  I’ve done this with Gmail, Google Calendar, Kindle Cloud reader, Tweetdeck, and more.

Now, this could almost justify a Surface Pro X (since it has a native version of Edge Chromium) if the Surface Pro 7 wasn’t so awesome.

But, combine the increasingly effective mobile hardware with web really and truly starting to be functional as apps, and it’s a brave and awesome new world.

SoundPackager NG

This year we’ve beefed up our engineering staff and are in the process of going through all the Object Desktop apps and updating them with what we call NG (next generation) versions.  For the most part, these are total rewrites.

Why? Because Windows 10 has been out long enough that it’s starting to get a little stale and we’re seeing increasing interest in tools that let people enhance their Windows experience to their liking again.

The first out of the gate is SoundPackager 10. 

SoundPackager lets you easily change your windows sound scheme by applying a package of sounds.  The new version has been updated to be compatible with Windows 10 (and 7 and 8) and lets you download and apply packages right from WinCustomize from within the app.

If you have Object Desktop (www.objectdesktop.com), you will be able to start using it by the time you’re reading this.

The Political Machine 2020

The Political Machine is a presidential candidate simulator disguised as a strategy game. 

We’ve previously released 2004, 2008, 2012 and 2016 editions.  This year, however, we rewrote it from scratch.  The old engine was starting to feel like one of those legacy apps you probably have to use from time to time. You know, the app that still has Windows NT icons floating in there and has weird GUI controls. 

Since we we rewrote it, we were able to make the simulation a lot deeper, which let us add some new features that would have previously required too much CPU time to recalculate the issues (2004 was the era of the Pentium 4!).

If you’re into politics at all, you’ll like this game.  My favorite new feature is that every candidate has their own ideology tree.  Your candidate can visit town halls which gives them ideology points. In turn, they can buy ideologies.  For instance, Trump has “Build the Wall” and “No state lines for insurance” (remember that issue? Yeah, no one else does either). The net result is that each game can feel pretty different based on which candidate you go up against.

This new system also lets us have absurd candidates like Giant Meteor, whose ideology includes “Kill all humans” and “Boil the seas”.  You can be certain that people will be talking about those issues once you have made them part of your platform.

You can visit www.politicalmachine.com to get it now!