It's advertorial talk, and as such I kinda grin (my girl somewhere in time got an account over there, so I see that newsletter sometimes, it's full of it) - commercial, and working, it seems, I don't begrudge the SD guys their success (nor do I think they're that rich)...

Technically speaking though, well, claims like that get messy indeed. I'm very amused though with this gadgets stuff. So I have this widget displaying ram, or emulating the bin, or I dunnowhat, and then export as a standalone thing ?! Didn't we used to call that an executable, bearing names like Oxygenator, Lompster or whatever ? It just sounds vaguely familiar...

Edit: and for conceiving the concept, credit goes to Bill when introducing Active Desktop, maybe ?...

Bradley Wardell to the best of my knoweledge was originally from Texas but moved to Michigan and got an education at taxpayers expense. He was a C student that did mediocre programming for OS/2 until he switched to M$ Windows and hit upon something that proved to be marketable.. He once told me that I should move to Cuba after a heated debate at skinz. I unfortunately was one of taxpayers that helped pay for his education.

re: Credit.... I'd almost have to say Steve Jobs. A friend of mine had a Mac waaaaaaaaaaaaay back in the day, and here Trash can had "Oscar the Grouch" pop out and grumble at you. Pretty funny.

Meh...I never really bothered with any widgets, except for a brief stint with Sysmetrix. Now, I couldn't be bothered, ever since I learned that VBScript can report anything I need to know/care about.

I always get a laugh out of some of the widgets that I see that FILL the desktop with so much useless info...not to mention the fact that Sysmetrix probably added at least 4-5 secs before my desktop becomes responsive on boot. Blecch.

Obviously Brad has a good eye and spots the good stuff early on, He has progressed so much w/ DX and the person who originated it sold his gold too early, who knows maybe he needed the money badly? but it would have paid off if he knew better to hold out longer. =(

Anyways you can't really blame Brad for being smart enough to jump on something he spotted early and could take it further then the originator could I guess...
(money can buy the programmer out but stilllll credit should be given where it's due I agree)
I hate that too when they take the program "and" all the credit, would be more respectfull if the original history was intact (but then I tend to like fairy tales too)

I'm nuatral overall to SD. I don't use thier products. They do have some nice skins, but I don't care really. They've also done somethings I haven't liked, but why rehash the past? I just leave the site be, and the products off my list to checks. It's the one skinnable site that I don't have an account there (and thus no news postings), and I don't want one there either.

Re: sold - developer of VDE got a job at SD, dunno if that still applies, but that's decent enough, imho. Also did that cursor program.

Also, it seems perfectly ok to me to dislike SD, the company, but please, no personal attacks.

plastic, I didn't realize the VDE developer is now employed by SD. That does change things...

I agree with most things people are saying here. Doreen, you're exactly right on Brad. He's definitely a good business man and has a great knack for good apps. As far as giving credit, I kinda see where SD can claim credit since the original developer is employed there.

As far as I know, the author of VDE is still the current lead developer of DesktopX. Same story for CursorEx/XP and WindowFX/Windowblinds (and that one (whatever its original name was) goes back a looong time).

Anyway, beakerman, if you don't like StarDock, then why are you subscribed to their newsletter? "Know your enemy" perhaps?

exactly, crae

That's right he ended up jumping on board the StarDock enterprise sometime after he sold his gold. hehe
I was under the impression that after Albert sold some code to them then Ian picked up the development on it and apparently Albert was made another offer to jump on board later on. (I could have assumed that wrong) At any rate the original devs names seemed to get buried along the way and the Company's name gets the Neon lights.
but as long as they (the developers are paid well and are happy that's all that matters I guess) tis the price you pay when you need some money and you can't take your program too far and big companies w/ proper funding and exposure can right?

I'm pretty amazed at how far Brad and Stardock has come and they back up what they talk w/ good programs and keep them fresh updating them constantly. not an easy task to keep up w/ the changing times and OS's and bugs that probably pop up w/ these programs for them over and over again.

Heh, just now remembered I tried out a shareware icon changing program long time ago (98 or so), forgot its name. That developer too was picked up and works on iconpackager now (at least, used to for years) as it was renamed.

IconCustomizer - Brian Harper

There !

For some reason, we still get Stardock "crippleware" news submissions at skinnables despite having a plain warning they won't get posted.

Gotta love their stubborn determination

I dont hate Stardock, but I dont particularly like some of the staff there.

Only software I hate is Spyware. *cough*radlight!*cough*
I have to give SD credit for not stooping that low. *crosses fingers*

And ya, I get the same thing. I've deleted them before, too. I kinda think we need a "no stardock" sign. Not to be anti-SD, but just to spell it out to lay users.

Sad thing is I've gotten messages at modblog suggesting that I post news on stardock stuff. Sorry, but if shareware wants me to post news on it, then it has to pay me in good old american dollars.

I'm a little bit late to the bash Brad party but I thought I would answer some of the things put up here:

Re VDE: VDE was developed by Alberto Riccio. It was, in essence, an animated desktop icon program that uses bitstrips of BMPs with mouse-overs.

Alberto Riccio has said, publicly, countless times that DesktopX contains not a single line of code from VDE. It is a very VERY different animal.

Moreover, as was pointed out, Alberto was hired and continues to work for Stardock.

And unlike 99.9% of software companies out there, Stardock puts Alberto's name in the about box with his own copyright message despite having no requirement to do so. We do that because we feel that developers should get public credit for what they do.

--

Secondly, I paid my own way through college thank you. I started working and saving for college when I was 6. And worked 3 jobs during college to pay for school which is why I was a "C" (2.6 gpa) student -- I was working 3 jobs.

I have no idea where or how my education suddenly became paid for by the tax payers. That's a fabrication and frankly, pretty insulting.

--

Re submissions to Modblog being ignored. Well considering that Stardock gave Deskmod a free server some years back - no strings attached - is it really crazy that we woudln't expect to be discriminated against?

--

Re submissions to skinnables. That's really pretty sad given that BootSkin and LogonStudio are totally free, no "cripple" about it and ObjectDock, also freeware is very popular.

--

The difference between me and the typical Stardock basher/hater is that I made my hobby my career. Over the years, I teamed up with other like minded people who loved this stuff enough to want to make it their career (Brian Harper, Neil Banfield, Alberto Riccio, etc.).

Having people doing it as part of their living has made sure that this stuff keeps progressing, evolving, and users keep getting support. Compare the apps from the skinz.org days and what is out now. The developers who can work on this stuff as part of their job keep updating and the ones who don't tend to fade away.

What gets me is that some of you think there's this huge difference between me and some of you. As if those of us who turned our hobby into a career are suddenly transformed into greedy scum.

Stardock != Brad. Stardock = Brad, Alberto, Neil, Brian, and tons of other developers and skinners. And we don't become somehow "the undead", ready to drink blood just because we want to work on this stuff full-time.

woa, talk about digging up a year old thread...

Tis true. But the issues raised are on-going.

There is this myth that what Stardock has done is merely go around buying up freeware and then turning around and selling it. And that is simply not true.

Stardock has never bought anyone out. We wrote a program for OS/2 called Object Desktop. When we moved to Windows, we went out to find developers who we thought could make Windows programs similar to what we had on OS/2. Those developers in turn became part of Stardock and have been to this day.

Frogboy, I believe we just witnessed your first (and second) post here at VP I'm very glad to see you here. I hope you don't feel unwelcome, we really do encourage differing viewpoints: for example no one flamed Doreen when she defended Stardock's ingenuity.

I guess the point I was trying to make a year ago, was that Stardock wasn't "the first company to introduce the concept in the real world with the 2000 release of DesktopX." Stardock later employed Alberto Riccio, the developer who introduced the concept to Windows. I concede that I was incorrect about Stardock buying the rights to the app. In fact, I concede all other points. Your explanation was very well written and I respect the professional tact you maintained in it.

Please continue to post here. I'd like to see you here in the community, your experience would be invaluable.

[EDIT] I also wanted to point out that I truly respect the fact that you made your hobby your career. I was reorg'ed out of my development position a few years ago and have yet to recover career-wise. I think it's great that you love your job.

Hi Beaker, actually I used to post a bit. My account is very very old.

Thanks for your kind words.

With regards to DesktopX - you are correct in that the concept of having rich content on the desktop. In actuality, the concept was inspired from IBM.

Here's the URL: http://www.stardock.com/products/desktopx/dx-history.asp

The point I was making was that end user-created mini-applets on the desktop, while not a new concept, expressed itself first as DesktopX (VDE had no scripting, no plugins, etc. it couldn't create mini apps). The reason we made a point about that was because Mac users had been flaming us actively around that time in claiming that DesktopX was a "rip off" of Konfabulator.

Anyway, thanks for the invitation and I will try to hang out more.

Skinning and customization I think will get a real shot in the arm with Vista I think and there will be a lot of new people (freeware and nonfreeware) coming out with neat things in the next couple years (or I hope so anyway).

Let's hope so. But it's going to quite some time before it comes out.

/me starts saving for a new machine to be able to run Vista

/me stats looking into a alternate os with less of a footprint...

/me suggests some Slackware.

So how about that Slackware? Number 11 will be out soon.
http://slackware.com/

In all seriousness, I would care more about Vista, if the biggest new feature I can think of wasn't nice looking unicode fonts. (Meiryo looks good)

nah, im more interested in gobolinux.
but it shares some similaritys with slackware i think.

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