| I am so upset with Stardock... |
| Tuesday, May 30, 2006 |
| -Apurva |
Stardock is probably that one company that I have been loyal to,
the longest. Ever since WindowBlinds launched, and i shifted to the
windows platform (after using Kaleidoscope on the mac), I have been
following Stardock.
I have always thought that Stardock is a
great company with really good products. What they have always lacked
are good skinners and programmers who would take full advantage of the
stardock products (apart from WindowBlinds) to create great interfaces
or software. Even though the biggest skinners in the world are creating
mind blowing themes for WindowBlinds, there are doing little to create
other interfaces and widgets that better the usability of the PC in
general. Take the example of ObjectBar. ObjectBar is a great tool to
create bars and menus and meters and can give a whole new look and
functionality. But the most of the themes that people made using object
bar were the ones that mimicked the Windows XP Start menu on older
systems. So what is the point that I am trying to make? The point is
that Stardock needs to further encourage skinners to build better
stuff.
And at least from my personal point of view, they are
anything but encouraging. I have tried messaging, mailing and
commenting on posts just to get in touch with Brad Wardell (Frogboy)
and/or other people from Stardock, so that i could get some help from
their team while we were building the uZable Flick Gadget, but I got no
response. I even created the whole content page with screenshots way
before we released the gadget, and send out the links so that we can
catch some attention of the Stardock guys, no response yet. We
submitted the Flickr Gadget to Desktopgadgets.com (a stardock site
meant to showcase gadgets) and it took about a month to even get it up
there! Frankly i would expect the guys to jump at the submission of the
Flickr Gadget as 90% of the gadgets submitted there are crappy pieces
of code. For example, one of the popular RSS widgets there actually
manually parses the XML file to get the content of the feed! It really
looked like 18th century code!
I agree that I am no major
contributor towards the themes and skins library, and hence
insignificant. I also agree that people like Frogboy are really, really
busy people and cant respond to every mail they receive and need to run
a growing software company. (I could contest that though, I run a
software company too, and have always made sure that people interested
in contributing are catered to). Maybe it was just my tuff luck that I
had a bad experience. Considering all of these, I still think that
Stardock is doing a pathetic job in encouraging newcomers into the
skinning scene, as they are focused towards catering to and 'featuring'
a few handpicked skinners.
So I guess its time to move on for
me.... in search of clearer skies. I finally decided to go back to my
long time favorite platform, Samurize. Does this mean that there wont
be any new uZable Gadgets any more? Or the flickr Gadget ends right
here? Not at all.... It just means you guys can expect a high quality
uZable offering for the samurize platform (while the rest of the uZable
team continues their work on the gadgets). Will post some preview
screens here as soon as i can.
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