NPD has released the top 10 best selling PC games for February. Here are the results:
February 2008

Call Of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (Activision) Sins Of A Solar Empire (Stardock) World Of Warcraft: Battle Chest (Blizzard) The Sims 2 Free Time Expansion Pack (EA) World Of Warcraft: Burning Crusade Expansion Pack (Blizzard) World Of Warcraft (Blizzard) The Orange Box (EA) The Sims 2 Deluxe (EA) The Sims: Castaway Stories (EA) Crysis (EA)Stardock's Sins of a Solar Empire was #2 overall for the ...

Version 6   I have to admit, I'm pretty excited about SkinStudio 6. Which is surprising in some respects because I was deeply involved in the design of SkinStudio 1 through 5.  With SkinStudio 6, the WindowBlinds team wrote it with my part being mostly that of providing input rather than design direction.  SkinStudio 1 through 5 was designed to provide a quasi-Corel Draw style user interface.  The design worked out well in the early days when WindowBlinds wasn't tha...

After a year of rewriting SkinStudio from scratch, Stardock has released SkinStudio 6.

SkinStudio is a free program designed to make it easy for people to create WindowBlinds skins.  Version 6 has been completely rewritten to provide a much simpler user experience for creating skins.

Making your own skinsSkinStudio makes it a snap to design your own skins for WindowBlinds.  When a user desires to create a new skin, they start out with either Luna (if it's on Windows XP) or Aero (...

Our friends at Ironclad are experiencing first hand what it means to make a 4X game that has really good multiplayer.

Each time we do an update, users (almost exclusively hard core multiplayer users) come out and make posts decrying this or that change to the game.  To the casual visitor of the site, you'd think the sky had fallen "1.03 is ruined!" or "We need an emergency patch!" but when you actually look at the content of the post, it's always some trivial tweak that users believe has...

Worth watching. Seriously.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/229

The new Dragon visual style from Stardock Design doesn't just look great, it's fast. For most users, Dragon makes Windows faster than the default look of either Windows XP and especially Windows Vista. On top of that, it has stunning animation on the Start menu at full 30fps. And did we mention it does this without slowing down your PC?  This is what happens when you develop a technology that integrates seamlessly into the native Windows display engine while taking advantage of advances in ...

 

Add your own in the comments area.

The Stardock Design website has gotten a re-design. But what should the About page say?

I was thinking something like this:

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Stardock has long been a pioneer in developing first-to-market technology for the PC market.  It was the company that essentially created "skinning" technology on the PC with products such as WindowBlinds, DeskScapes, DirectSkin, DesktopX, IconPackager, ObjectBar, and more.  Through Stardock's technology, Windows users cou...

 
Object Desktop 2008 Guided Tour

Introduction

Object Desktop is the defacto standard when it comes to changing your Windows experience. If you want to take control over how Windows looks, feels, and functions, Object Desktop is the way to do it.  Since its original release for Windows back in 1999, Object Desktop and its components have garnered millions of users worldwide.  Parts of it have been licensed to virtually every major technology company you can think of at one time or other.

Over the years, Object Desktop got bigger..and bigger...and bigger to the point where it had dozens of programs that came with it. Needless to say, it became a little unwieldy for the average user.  So for 2008, Stardock has split the product into two versions:

Have some change you would like to see made to JoeUser? Make it here.

CPU-Z 1.44.1 report file

Processor(s)   Number of processors 1 Number of cores 1 per processor Number of threads ...

We have something pretty cool being cooked up for The Political Machine 2008. It ties in with www.joeuser.com as well.

Check out http://beta.politicalmachine.com

Another year has passed!  It's that time of the year again where we look back on last year and do a post mortem on where skinning has been and where it's going. You can see last year's here. 2007 was a pretty big year for skinning. A sucky year but big nevertheless.

What is skinning?Skinning is the process of customizing the look and feel of something to your personal taste.  If you could change the shape and color of your car, you could say your car was skinnable.  Over the pa...

At the end of the day, the people who "do stuff" will always have the advantage over the people who "don't do stuff".  Pirates are slowly motivating ever increasing levels of DRM and in time, I hate to say it, DRM is going to win.  That's because the people motivated to make the DRM work (the people who do stuff) greatly outnumber the motivation of the people who don't do stuff. 

One can easily picture a future in 5 years in which the telecoms, the PC makers, the OS makers, and...

The security issues in Vista make me want to cry.