Because Tune Up and Styler 2's ceos didn't go around the net trashing Stardock or WindowBlinds. They didn't go around to skin sites across the net posting endless "teasers". They don't put up mock up screenshots that look fantastic and then fail to deliver on them.

It is called back lash.

Because Hyperdesk and Object Desktop don't set out to do the same things.



About a year and a half I think. It has tons of themes already. I read the CEO of Skins Factory refer to MyColors themes as 'mediocre' and then they release the Sony ericson theme which is weaker than any premium skin I've seen. Why shouldn't I just get a uxtheme patch, go to studio28.com and download the great visual styles there for free? or go to Deviantart and get great visuals styles there?

I guess my question is what all the hype was about? what is the point of hyperdesk at all? I understand the idea of Mycolors better even if I think Mycolors justification of existing is not super strong. But at least with Mycolors I can go find my favorite sports team or college and have it as my desktop and its a very complete experience. Or I can buy Object desktop for $50 and get thousands of themes. But hyperdesk is way behind in what it can do and isn't likely to get better and it only hopes to provide themes that i could get for free. Who cares about disney themes. I can go out and download a free visual style from deviantart and apply one of the thousands of disney wallpapers on the net. Why would I pay for that?

I'm not against hyperdesk. I am questioning what point it has at all. It was hyped for a year and so I was expecting something a lot more.

And you got the Wall-E and Disney theme

So the CEO might be a douchebag, but we all are at some point in our lives.
I still like the look of the hyperdesk themes Well... apart from the toolbars... eugh.. :NOTSURE:

And its not gonna deter me from buying it when it is vista compatible.

Amen.

Using technology that's how old? For an aging,on it's way out OS,that may be fine.No offense to XP users intended but Vista is what new computers come with,like it or not.A NEW program that only works with OLD systems is pretty damn lame,imho.
The Vista solution should have been in place at launch but by the time it is,hyperdesks shortcomings should be obvious.We'll see.

My 2 cents.....I'm not heading over to the Dark Side but.....

I see good coming from the fact that now there's competition in this particular market...that's always good for the enduser.

I can see Hyperdesk introducing a new group of people to skinning and many will eventually migrate to Windowblinds or Mycolors. So that's good too.

My biggest issue is the fact that a skinner like KOL will no longer be doing Windowblinds.....
....leastwise not while his work is paying Jesh's mortgage

As far as TSF/Jesh is concerned.....I sincerely hope he gets exactly what he deserves

Maybe Stardock should hire KOL to their stables Now that would be bloody brilliant!!

What do you mean? Do you have the Wall-E and Disney theme in hand? Are you not getting the reason people are frustrated? The presentation of the themes and the website is bloody awesome. But the themes when you actually get them are pretty middling. show me some real screenshots of those other themes with how many icons come with them and then comment.

^
I can comment whenever i want to buddy.
Just take it down a notch and stop getting your pants in a twist over something so ridiculous as this.

Sounds like you are speaking for eveybody there. Other than the shabby toolbars, no vista support, only a few icons. I suppose im not getting it.


Thats your opinion again. You are obviously entitled to it. I wouldnt mind spending that money on it. Get styler toolbar and thats the toolbar problem out of the way.

I hardly think $10 is anything to complain about. Icons are crisp as hell and mediaplayer looks equally crisp with a bit of badass added to it

I don't think Styler skins all 60 or so toolbar icons does it?  :NOTSURE: 

vStyler does tho..   

Lol, true

I was using the Dark Matter skin today and was watching a video on the skinned media player. I moved the visual to the right side of my screen and it left a shadow of the window in the spot where it had originally been. Stayed there until I closed the media player. Just an observation.   

They have a support forum, just try not to be too critical you may get blocked.

That happens to me sometimes too, but it does it whether I have an .msstyles is applied or a Windowblinds skin is applied. makes no difference. (:(

Yeah...because it's Q&A....Quality AND Assurance, don't you know anything????

Today I took the day off and just played around with this free suite. I didn't like the msstyle because it didn't match the wallpaper. This is just my take on how I would have done it. A little time consuming because I have to create a lot of them.
The icons are great but there's a lot of repeats...Image, Video and Music files. This can be a fine suite if worked right.

Sony Ericsson Onyx Series from The Skins Factory
Imported from Hyperdesk (msstyle) to Stardock's Windowblinds & Iconpackager

Reworked in Skin Studio 6 to give it a more professional look.
Windowblinds 50% completed...For personal use only.

vStyler-

I've looked through your portfolio. There's some decent stuff in there – but nothing mind-blowing. Certainly nothing to justify your sense of righteous design indignation. I think you've let some good feedback go to your head.

I've been at this for 15 years, commercially for 8. In that time I've pushed countless billions of pixels for some of the biggest companies in the world across millions of desktops. But you won't see me jumping around from forum to forum criticizing the design of other enthusiasts or professionals. The dose of reality I was compelled to serve you with in the previous paragraph is the closest I've ever come.

I'd like to think of this as a greater community. One where fellow enthusiasts and professionals should be free to pursue their passion for interface design without being shit on by their peers. KoL made a deliberate design decision - one that the client paying for the project approved of.  To tell KoL, a guy that I know for a fact has poured his soul into everything he's ever done, that he was being lazy and made a poor design decision is not only unfair, but an offense to the community as a whole. Just who the fuck are you to feel justified in that kind of hubris?

So lay off on the FUD. Get off the bully-pulpit and quit shouting accusations that have no merit. If you're disappointed it isn't because you were deceived - we made plain our initiative from the get-go and refuse to take responsibility for your baseless expectations.

All-

Like I said, we're all brothers and sisters... we all share a passion for custom interfaces, whether we enjoy creating them or just using them. The Skins Factory/Hyperdesk is not a faceless commercial entity - it's a group of your peers, people just like you, trying to become self-reliant and make their passion pay for itself. This is something that should be celebrated and welcomed by the larger community. 99.99% of users wouldn't know how to skin their PC if their life depended on it - so there's certainly enough room in the sea for everybody.

My friends and I, we just want to be able to let our imaginations run fee. We want to be able to create commercial-grade interfaces that aren't art directed by clients and we want to share them with the world. We're just like you - we squeal like little kids when our stuff starts coming together. We truly do love what we do.

Hyperdesk allows us to do this. It allows us to be self-reliant and innovate on our own terms - of course there are always limitations involved, but like anyone else we attempt to overcome these by pushing the limits on our creativity. Obviously, this will be an ongoing process - Hyperdesk is a 1.0 product. But make no mistake, it will continue to evolve and improve and expand. We've invested and continue to invest countless hours and our own money into making this a slick and seamless experience for the end user. We want your mom to be able to use it.

So please, I didn't spend the past 8 months away from my family as I worked into the nights and weekends to see my efforts plagued by accusations of deceit and cut corners. Any accusations of deceitful intent on the part of the people involved with Hyperdesk are both unfair and unjustified - we've shown nothing in previews that doesn't ship with the products. We've taken pains to describe the contents of each hypersuite in great detail. We've poured our hearts and souls into making these products the best we know how. This isn't a cold attempt at a grabbing up cash from our fellow enthusiasts, it's a heart-felt foray into the unknown. If some of you are able to appreciate this and participate then we're perfectly happy... others made up their minds before we launched and will never be satisfied.

In any case, the success or failure of our efforts will not be determined by the odd mini-Napleon and his gang of me-toos in any online forum. In my experience these people simply like to masturbate each other while making everybody else miserable.

I dunno . I've had my differences in opinion with vStyler but Vienna and Harmony are some top class stuff. As good ( subjectively ) as anything TSF has come up with stylisticly , yet supporting more features ( wb vs msstyles )

To Kol.

If you read this , I'd just like to say , Thallos and Fresco are amongst my all time favourite skins . You are indeed amongst the top class when it comes to work . It's puzzling that you've chosen a medium that limits you the way msstyles does, but so be it . I welcome the day ( if it happens ) that you decide to return to WB skinning.

You mean a whole 8 months????

I've spent the last 8 y e a r s away from mine, what do you want.. a cookie? Is it somehow better because you spent a little time at it? I have also worked commercially for several companies, have millions of downloads on millions of PC's.. I too pour my heart into EVERY single pixel like no one you have ever met, you can take that to the bank... what's your point?

I'll speak my mind in any forum that allows free speech until you pry my words from my cold dead tongue, You coming in here and playing bad cop won't change that a single iota.. my friend.

I'll tell u what gives me the right.. TSF coming here and mouthing off like a jackass about how much better you are, criticizing everything and everyone with a better than thou attitude.. there's no denying it, its public record. Well guess what.. u say the wrong things to the wrong people, there are repurcussions, you wanna come around and throw down gauntlets like that, expect someone with a little pride to pick it up and slap you with it.

I hold no contempt for most people, anyone here will tell you that given an opportunity , i am the first to jump in and provide help, so please, enough with the kumbayah routine as if your everyones friend and I'm some evil dictator, I tell it like it is, I don't mix words, the fact is, from an educated , experienced point of view, the free theme, the launch theme, was poorly executed in my opinion, Ive said, it had some great parts but it was nothing special, it was nothing that hasn't been done several times. I could write a full page article on its shortcomings but I havent. You'll find I'm not the only one who thinks this by a long shot.

If you wanna know 'who the fuck i am' show up at a certain contest this year.. put your gun in the hand of your best shot and we can let our work speak for us. Meanwhile, your not on your block, If you think you will in anyway change how I act, comment, or what I say..OR delete\block my words..You can dream on.

Learn how to take criticism.

It didn't make sense to us or to our clients to expect the user to pony-up for both a WB license and a theme package. That isn't to say that we won't or haven't considered simultaneous releases in WB format. Hyperdesk is what it is, it was never meant to compete feature-by-feature with Windowblinds, nor was the intention to alienate our fellow WB users. Feature comparisons at this stage are both unproductive and irrelevant.

... to the inferior product... I bet they are.

Ouch - guess that hurt

I stand by everything I said jackass. And I'm simply too busy and care too little to participate in a pissing contest with you, not that I couldn't design circles around you in my sleep, hahaha. Not that you don't have skills - I never said that. I just said that what you have doesn't justify your hubris. Learn some humility and manners, that would serve you better.

Oh, and I haven't heard you apologize to KoL yet. Be a big man, stop acting like a little boy.

Kiddo, you keep comparing apples and oranges... it's irrelevant.

Good to be back. I'll be in here all week....

vstyler: Not going to waste my time with you. You're obviously jealous that we might take 5 sales away from your maxstyles or whatever its called. I get it.

The rest: Have I spoken out against the products here on numerous occasions? Guilty as charged. But let's be perfectly honest, most of the recent stuff were retaliations from the gang banging we got on this thread from the get-go.

Love me or hate me I've been doing skins for a very long time. Since 1999. Back in the days when we had flame wars in IRC and i'd get banned by Shoggot and 10c. God damn that was fun. Anyway i digress... My original account (Brad, feel free to unban my real account when you're done hanging at the lake heh)number is 4517. Most of you are like in the millions. So i've been around the block.

The days of getting into long, drawn out flame wars are over. I have to much on my plate. I will say this about some misinformation being dished out like soup at a mission...

Sony Ericsson: It was my call for the flat UI. This theme was actually done in 2006. That's how long we've been sitting on it. At the time i was sick of all the 3D themes and wanted something clean. Web 2.0 look was out and it was nice. So we kept a 3D framework and went super flat for the toolbars and tabs. I used that theme for a year. Don't like a color? There's like 9. Change it. We were provided swatches for some of the colors (like the default) because unlike most of you, this was a professional skin being contracted out to us by a client. The client is king. That's how it goes. Personally I like it. So that's that.

Z71: You're violating our EULA by altering our work. I can't stop you from doing stuff for your personal use but i can stop you from showing it publicly. You don't have the right to post our work in a different format. You gave up that right when you clicked okay when you installed it. You act like you're doing something we couldn't have done. Give me a break. You want some attention, work on your own themes not ours.

As far as the comments about Hyperdesk being nothing more than a "handful of icons, an msstyles and a wmp skin", I think I disagree. E

The DarkMatter trilogy themes consist of 25 icons (with 3 different style of folders both vertical and horizontal and icons that are the most common (sorry if we didn't skin that zip file icon for ya), not 1 but 2 entirely different looking themes, a custom wallpaper done by an incredible artist and Billy, a WMP 11 skin for videos and an animated iTunes/WMP remote that looks too cool for school. All that for 10 bucks. You think we're ripping people off? Riiiight.

The other themes have either 7 colors included plus a wmp and a widget or 2 sets of icons that are around 50 icons. No one is not getting their money's worth.

I read a comment from one guy who calls our themes "middling" or something like that but then probably hasn't tried more than the Sony E theme. If so, what's your order number buddy? You said "themes" that means plural. I've never seen people complain so much over a free theme in my life.

Screenshots: love this one. You need to see a shot of a window? Most of them have at least a titlebar shot or the branded ones show a whole window. I choose how i want to show our work. You know what a window consists of? A lot of white space. Considering you have limited space to show all of the elements of a theme i choose to leave the big white square off. If we were asked nicely, I would be happy to send a customer a shot of a window before they bought one of our products. When i have some time i will probably do some screenshots of just the windows so people can see them on our site. Maybe you're right, they should see it all.

Anyway that its. Flame way but i've said my peace. Brad and I have made peace and i like that. Reminds me of the old days which i miss. The skinz.org days and the fun of IRC.

Regards,

Jeff

No, you got it right.   


Bald u mean.




  

The offer stands, put up or shut up.. kiddo.