Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on September 26, 2007 by CyberNet.

Microsoft was finally able to ship an update to the Ultimate Extras a few days after the deadline they had set for themselves. The new DreamScene download doesn’t appear to have any different features from the preview that had been released prior to this, but it does include four new DreamScenes with it. Oh, and it doesn’t work with Vista SP1 Beta.

In the DreamScene release announcement Microsoft commended Stardock on their free DeskScapes app which extends DreamScene. As we’ve previously shown there are a lot of free Dreams out there created by Stardock, as well as their users, but the dynamic Dreams cost a few dollars to pickup.

Unfortunately the Language Packs weren’t able to make the cut as of now, and are expected to make it out the door in late October. As Long Zheng pointed out DreamScene hasn’t been modified since mid-July according to the compilation date in the DLL, which probably means that they were waiting to ship it with the Language Packs.

My question is how many people actually want to use these language packs? The purpose of them is to switch between multiple languages on your computer, or to let each user on a computer designate a different language for themselves. It might be just what the doctor ordered for some people, but everyone that I’ve talked to say that they won’t touch them.

The Language Packs are causing a lot of headaches, and are even preventing the Ultimate Extras team from announcing any future plans:

Recently we realized that Ultimate customers who tried to install the language packs that shipped earlier this year were experiencing an unacceptably high number of failures during installation. We continue to make delivering the highest quality, most secure Extras our top priority, and we will not ship any Extra until it is absolutely ready.
…
In addition to the remaining Language Packs, we plan to ship a collection of additional Windows Ultimate Extras that we are confident will delight our passionate Windows Vista Ultimate customers. We will shed more light on these plans once the Language Packs are finally dislodged from our delivery pipeline!

What I really want to see come out of the Ultimate Extras are things for power users! There is no doubt that only the most hardcore gamers and users will be the ones who pickup Vista Ultimate, and they need to cater more to that audience. By that I mean releasing advanced configuration tools for the operating system. Why not create a nice virtual desktop implementation, let users manually reorder and group Taskbar items, enable system-wide skinning without any hacks, and how about a wallpaper app that shuffles through your images? Come on Microsoft, give Ultimate users something to get excited about, and show us all the cool things that you can do with the Aero interface!

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