CoolPlayer (by Niek Albers) will be Open Source. He is inviting programmers to co-develop future versions of this great player. Niek believes that he needs other programmers on his CoolPlayer project to compete with other players. At the moment he is cleaning of the code for the release.

For some time now Stardock has an IRC server. You can chat there with developers, skinners and WinCustomizers. It is probably the fastest way to get support when the right people are present there. If you don't have an IRC client then you can still visit us by using an applet you'll find at: https://www.stardock.com/stardock/chat/ We used to be on EFnet but that was too much of a hasle. If you have an IRC client then you can visit us at irc.stardock.com (port 6667) and join the #Stardock ...

The IRC and mail servers are down. There is some bad wheather near Livonia. Maybe the two events are connected and let's hope it doesn't ruin their 4th of July party. That means you might have trouble with IRC (chatting), newsgroups, support, ordering and retrieving your serial numbers. The guys are probably working on it right now. We apologize for any invonvenience this may cause.

All is well again. IRC freaks are strange people who love to ban, but randomly banning people in the #Stardock channel was too much. Often people come there for support and are visiting the channel for the first time. In the message board I'll describe how it was solved by... banning everyone in the channel. See the link for details.

DX 1.1 not only includes the new scripting facility, but also has a media player called StardockPlayer. Unlike other players it does not have its own skinning format. Instead it is skinned by DesktopX. Later on it can be skinned by ObjectBar and WindowBlinds too. The player supports various audio, MIDI, movie and image formats. It has a size of 170KB and will take up about 4.5 to 7MB RAM. It requires DirectX 8.x to run and can use regular Windows codecs. The player is in early deve...