There's an issue with the install of 1.01. Yeah, I know, what else is new right? Anyway, the install seems to delete your preexisting dreams that you have installed... even ones you downloaded after installing 1.00. Kinda stupid if you ask me... still can't belive that the testers mis the little stuff like this.

I'm no longer happy

Same thing happened to me. I have lost all my previous .Dream files.

While Stardock has some great software I just won't live without, but it seems in order to get some needed extra, you must get Object Desktop. But Object desktop comes with too many things I don't want. Windowblinds and IconPackager are the two best things about Stardock. It almost safe to say that DeskScapes 1.01 is retails. Things that can't be purchased such as Desktop Earth requires Object Desktop and Object Desktop is not free. I'll be buying DeskScapec without buying it technically or I'll be buying Desktop Earth without it being retail. Maybe it’s just about doing smart business forcing sell of Object Desktop. I would not mind Desktop Earth being a Premium .DREAM because it's always up to anyone to buy it and no one is forced to.

I'm going to enter straight into communication with Frogboy.

While Stardock makes the best software in the category of skinning, I often ask myself if they have people inventing new goodies.

Yes, windowblinds is the greatest thing in skinning and make XP looks great with Glass style and all as if it were Vista. Why no one ever came up with that kind of idea first since Windowblinds and SkinStudio do it so well? Now Microsoft comes with the animated wallpaper (I’ve seen animated wallpapers way before though) but Stardock simply make it better. It seems stardock does not invent much, but uses ideas and make them better.

Any chance of SD making an XP version of Deskscape/Dreamscene or is there something in your agreement with MS that prevents that? Or is it maybe an OS/hardware issue?

  

the first build of deskscapes stored the dreams in one location and the newest build stores them in another. i'm betting your installation did not transfer the dreams to the new location. check in c:\programdata\stardocl\deskscapes and see if they're still there. if they are, transfer them to user name\docs\stardock\dreams

DeskScapes requires tech that is only in Windows Vista.

Is there an SDK for Dynamic(3D) Dreams?

I believe the plan is to put the SDK out next week.

Elias - You can find your old dreams in this directory:

\programdata\stardock\Deskscapes

off your root drive.

Who says Microsoft invented animated wallpaper?  DeskScapes development precedes animated wallpaper from Microsoft. We simply chose to combine our strengths and work together for mutual benefit.

And dynamic animated wallpaper is quite an achievement.  Load up the cube one and check your CPU use.  Tell me if anyone else could do that.  Those people floating around on the net ttrying to get you to play a screen saver as your wallpaper or some WinXP user saying how you could hack animated wallpapers should try to do it while using less than 5% CPU use the way DeskScapes does it.

We have a number of internal projects but they take time to come out. 

Many of the things we "invent" we rarely get credit for.  We "invent" the concept of widgets and companies like Konfabulator/yahoo Widgets get the credit. 

We were the ones who first introduced ZIP files as folders. Does anyone remember that? Probably not.

And now we have DeskScapes which is a pretty significant innovation.  Even little things like the .dream format will likely be forgotten in time.  Does anyone seriously think animated wallpapers would be taking off like they are if users were forced to scrounge around for .WMV files or .MPEG files? Talk about a search term of doom.  And consider all the development effort necessary to support .DREAM - the tools, the website, the video previews, large scale upload handilng, etc.  These are things that quickly get taken for granted -- we want them to because it should be invisible.

But never confuse seamlessness for resting on ones laurals.

I will say truthfully that we have changed in that we won't develop something new that we can't adequately market.  I can tell you it stings our development team considerably every time we read about how "Konfabulator" "invented" desktop widgets or that Apple/Microsoft were copying them while we get no coverage.

Check out this desktop from the year 2000. That's Windows 2000. SEVEN years ago. Wow, a alpha blended, glass "sidebar" of "widgets" on the right.  Good thing this was invented 3+ years later by other people or that Apple "invtented" it with Dashboard. And that's a theme from this site by a user (there's hundreds of this kind of thing).

Rant aside, the point is that we are as inventive as ever, we simply are more careful to keep things under wraps until they have matured further.  We kept DeskScapes under wraps even as it was running on our Longhorn betas nearly a year ago.  If you saw what we had in development, your eyes would pop out.

 

Thanks for taking the time to explain. At least you get some truth out you wanted to be heard. I've always wanted to get my eyes pop out, throw it all at me.   

Yeah, because that's a much better place then the following.



Who comes up with these decisions anyway? I haven't checked to see if this is correct, but why would they put in under personal files? They should have programmed it in such a way that it keeps the dream files in the same freaking place that MS's side of things keeps their own animated wallpaper files. Wouldn't that make much more sense. WTF?

Carmen Elektra "live" on your desktop? Hell yes !!   

jrsccivic98, i'm thinking the location change was because when most people back-up their data, they back up the entire "documents" folder. by having the dreams inside that folder, the user's dreams are backed up, also. to me, the current location of the dream files is completely logical.

Glad I know where old files are located. I thought they were all deleted. I did not know where Stardock kept them. That's a lot of space that would have been wasted (Over 500MB the least. Some files are over 80MB.) since I already downloaded them all again. It seems with the newer version, the size gets smaller now


UPDATE:


I went to Program Files > Stardock > Object Desktop > DeskScaped but they aren't there. I won't say they were deleted. I see people mentioned about "Pragamdata" There is no such folder.   



Whenever I download them, I always cut and paste them in the DeskScapes Animated wallpapers in Personalization window , so I never knew the direct folder where they are being kept.