How does it work

from Stardock Forums

I don't suppose the devs care to share the high-level of how this works technically? Are you subclassing the windows (HWND's)? How are you injecting your functionality into the AppContainer's process?

 

Some thought-leadership from the Stardock devs on this could open up endless possibilities here.

 

Thanks

modernmix
2,619 views 5 replies
Reply #1 from Stardock Forums Top

Generally Stardock do not reveal how any of the products work.

Ultimately there needs to be a business case for it.  Are you able to suggest one in this case?

Reply #2 from Stardock Forums Top

The business case would be largely around good-will towards the developer community. There's a growing number of companies that discuss how their products work (without necessarily providing the actual code/products) and those blogs/discussions generally reflect very positively. The gains would be a better perception of StarDock, recognition that StarDock is the technical leader in these areas and ultimately lead to increased sales.

 

By no means am I suggesting that the actual code be released, but rather a discussion of the techniques used to "tame" Windows 8.

Siege of Centauri
Reply #3 from Stardock Forums Top

It's better not. That way MS will have more difficulty in blocking companies like stardock in customizing windows 8 and blue.

Reply #4 from Stardock Forums Top

I guarantee that the Microsoft developers can reverse engineer how it's working in their debuggers as they have the original source code [to Windows] anyway. Discussing the techniques actually prevents Microsoft from "breaking" a single app. If more developers use a technique, it'll be harder to prevent it later.

Reply #5 from Stardock Forums Top

Quoting Oren, reply 2

The business case would be largely around good-will towards the developer community. There's a growing number of companies that discuss how their products work (without necessarily providing the actual code/products) and those blogs/discussions generally reflect very positively. The gains would be a better perception of StarDock, recognition that StarDock is the technical leader in these areas and ultimately lead to increased sales.

 

By no means am I suggesting that the actual code be released, but rather a discussion of the techniques used to "tame" Windows 8.

I would argue that the very fact the product exists would be sufficient to show that we have the technical abilities and all the press coverage pretty much shows to anyone who comes across it that we are the leader in this area.   Stardock are not a consulting company so the aim isn't to say "look at us and what clever things we can do", but rather sell actual products to consumers.

I think it is a very different thing to reveal how a small non key part of a product works than it is to reveal something thats more fundamental to the product.

As an example the Stardock game Fallen Enchantress introduced a new font rendering engine to get around the ugly fonts that previous DX9 games had.  Explaining how this works would have no negative impact to Stardock as this isn't the thing people buy the game for.  They buy it for the game itself and other games with nicer fonts is a good thing for everyone.  But revealing how ModernMix works may result in new products using that information which do directly compete with it.

Goodwill is a nice thing in theory, but product development has to pay for itself.  Many years ago we had people suggesting we gave our software away for free and instead perhaps mow lawns for money in the summer months (yes seriously!).  Software is expensive to create especially when doing anything in the US needs a legal department now.