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 Post subject: Rocketdock gallery is closing - a sad day
PostPosted: Thu Jul 19, 2018 1:19 pm 
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FYI - The old Rocketdock gallery is closing and Punklabs are not going to make any changes to their software nor release it as open source.

Might be a few more users tempted to use your dock offering as it is supported and presumably supports running under win10? I might give it a go myself and do a write-up if it works as expected.

I have been a rocketdocker for many years and a major proponent of it but now it is completely defunct it may be time to move on. One must take the hint when it is offered.


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 Post subject: Re: Rocketdock gallery is closing - a sad day
PostPosted: Thu Jul 19, 2018 5:45 pm 
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Wow. Sad day indeed.

Do you know if they still respond to emails? Perhaps they would be interested in Winstep hosting their gallery instead of it being lost forever.

I really hate when this stuff happens. Reminds me when Skinz.org closed its doors and hundreds of great and original NextSTART\Winstep themes were lost that day.

EDIT: The mail box associated to your user account here in the forums is full, by the way, so you won't receive a notification that I replied to your post. Hope you get to see this anyway.

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 Post subject: Re: Rocketdock gallery is closing - a sad day
PostPosted: Thu Jul 19, 2018 10:41 pm 
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Well, I reached out to them offering to host the RocketDock gallery if they wanted me to, but they feel they do not have the right to hand off the data they were entrusted with by their users, which I fully understand.

It will be a sad, sad, day indeed when the RocketDock gallery is lost forever. It really is as people say: eventually all good things must come to an end.

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 Post subject: Re: Rocketdock gallery is closing - a sad day
PostPosted: Fri Jul 20, 2018 11:36 am 
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Well, that was good of you to reach out to them.

I understand their logic but in truth every single submitter to the gallery would almost certainly back a transfer to you and allow you to host the gallery. You just can't get in touch with each and every one of them to confirm it.

I had over a million downloads of my icons, widgets, backgrounds and skins from the gallery and I'd happily transfer my collection to you. I am so disappointed that Rocketdock is closing. One of my main go-to resources for inspiration.


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 Post subject: Re: Rocketdock gallery is closing - a sad day
PostPosted: Fri Jul 20, 2018 9:15 pm 
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I also tried to reach out to them but those two girls, they are hard nuts. Rocketdock gallery is definitely closing.


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 Post subject: Re: Rocketdock gallery is closing - a sad day
PostPosted: Sat Jul 21, 2018 5:04 pm 
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yereverluvinuncleber wrote:
I understand their logic but in truth every single submitter to the gallery would almost certainly back a transfer to you and allow you to host the gallery. You just can't get in touch with each and every one of them to confirm it.


I run into the same issue with Skinz.org all those years ago. The admin of the site allowed me to download by FTP all the hundreds of themes, thumbnails, etc, but then there was nothing I could do with them without contacting the original authors first one by one - which would be an impossible task. So, I still have them all but there is nothing I can do with them.

Many great themes were lost that day.

yereverluvinuncleber wrote:
I had over a million downloads of my icons, widgets, backgrounds and skins from the gallery and I'd happily transfer my collection to you. I am so disappointed that Rocketdock is closing. One of my main go-to resources for inspiration.


I wish I had a Winstep gallery from the get go. Problem is that bandwidth was terribly expensive back in those days (as in thousands of dollars per month for something like that), and only recently did Winstep get its own bare-metal server.

Although I would be able to afford my very own Winstep gallery these days, it would still take time and money to build one, integrate it with the existing web site and forum users database, etc...

Have you thought already about uploading your collection to DeviantArt?

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 Post subject: Re: Rocketdock gallery is closing - a sad day
PostPosted: Sat Jul 21, 2018 6:43 pm 
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Anyway, all this prompted me to get into conversations with the right people to add a Winstep themes gallery to the Winstep web site.

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 Post subject: Re: Rocketdock gallery is closing - a sad day
PostPosted: Sat Jul 21, 2018 7:20 pm 
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winstep wrote:
Anyway, all this prompted me to get into conversations with the right people to add a Winstep themes gallery to the Winstep web site.

Hooray! Excellent, Jorge. Definitely needed. Both Deviant and WC are a waste of space, so it only makes perfect sense. I hate to say it.... Ah hell no I won't. ;)

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 Post subject: Re: Rocketdock gallery is closing - a sad day
PostPosted: Sun Jul 22, 2018 6:31 pm 
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WinStep wrote:
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Anyway, all this prompted me to get into conversations with the right people to add a Winstep themes gallery to the Winstep web site


Great! Maybe that'll give you a good reason to finish the theme builder!

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 Post subject: Re: Rocketdock gallery is closing - a sad day
PostPosted: Sun Jul 22, 2018 6:48 pm 
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DanDaBear wrote:
Great! Maybe that'll give you a good reason to finish the theme builder!


LOL. Perhaps. A million Dollars transferred to my account might help too... :wink:

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 Post subject: Re: Rocketdock gallery is closing - a sad day
PostPosted: Mon Jul 23, 2018 3:20 pm 
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winstep wrote:
DanDaBear wrote:
Great! Maybe that'll give you a good reason to finish the theme builder!

LOL. Perhaps. A million Dollars transferred to my account might help too... :wink:

LOLOL! I bet! I'd gladly get very bored for a bit for a million bucks. ;) If I had a few million to spare I'd even gladly give you 1TB (Terabuck) myself for a speedy ThemeBuilder, LOL. (I would and all. And finance you to re-write Winstep in C++ (employing a few people to help as well) with a few very fancy extras....)

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 Post subject: Re: Rocketdock gallery is closing - a sad day
PostPosted: Sun Jul 29, 2018 1:37 pm 
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winstep wrote:
yereverluvinuncleber wrote:
Have you thought already about uploading your collection to DeviantArt?


I have that done already, my gallery on DA is comprehensive.

https://www.deviantart.com/yereverluvinuncleber/gallery/

The trouble is the site is so poorly optimised (webwise) and so diverse in what it offers that the effect of uploading to deviantart is diluted. Rocketdock gallery was focussed on one subject whereas DA has hundreds of potential aims.

As a result the downloads are a mere fraction of what I might have expected from the RD gallery. A mere 118,000 page views on DA, the downloads might be 10% of that if I am lucky. That is throughout years of existence. On the RD gallery I probably had 10-12 million views over the same period.

On the old Yahoo widget gallery I was averaging a third of a million downloads per year for each widget, that was one thousand downloads per day for each widget. On DA it might be 150 downloads per day for all of them combined.

Puny in comparison.

customize.org, the yahoo widget gallery, rocketdock, skins.org - all gone. So few good places to host those themes and resources. All that work is basically lost to the world.

I applaud your idea for a new gallery. You will have all my themes, icons and hopefully you will have a misc section that allows widgets. I would have willingly converted my widgets to yours if it had been possible to do so but it needs a XML/jscript engine similar to Xwidgets/Ywidgets and your product does not have that...


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 Post subject: Re: Rocketdock gallery is closing - a sad day
PostPosted: Sun Jul 29, 2018 3:28 pm 
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yereverluvinuncleber wrote:
The trouble is the site is so poorly optimised (webwise) and so diverse in what it offers that the effect of uploading to deviantart is diluted. Rocketdock gallery was focussed on one subject whereas DA has hundreds of potential aims.


And there's no real filtering either. Winstep also has a themes section there and it's a big mess with stuff being uploaded there that has nothing to do with Winstep.

Sadly I have to agree that the DA Windows customization sections are indeed messy.

yereverluvinuncleber wrote:
As a result the downloads are a mere fraction of what I might have expected from the RD gallery. A mere 118,000 page views on DA, the downloads might be 10% of that if I am lucky. That is throughout years of existence. On the RD gallery I probably had 10-12 million views over the same period.


Agreed. Nothing like having your own targeted gallery. I wish I had had the means to do that myself years ago, instead of relying 100% on 3rd party skin sites.

yereverluvinuncleber wrote:
customize.org, the yahoo widget gallery, rocketdock, skins.org - all gone. So few good places to host those themes and resources. All that work is basically lost to the world.


Yep. Windows customization forums which were thriving just a few years ago are now ghost cities too. The whole thing is slowly but surely dying.

But I don't think it's just Windows customization. These days it seems the only thing that gets talked about is games and hardware. General purpose utilities seem to be completely ignored as well.

Some years ago we had things like Chris Pirillo's Lockergnome, a software newsletter, but he's now too busy vlogging about Star Wars on Youtube (and paying the price for that, his videos are now down to 1,000 views if that much).

yereverluvinuncleber wrote:
I applaud your idea for a new gallery.


Thanks. Let's just hope it's not too little, too late. :)

yereverluvinuncleber wrote:
You will have all my themes, icons and hopefully you will have a misc section that allows widgets. I would have willingly converted my widgets to yours if it had been possible to do so but it needs a XML/jscript engine similar to Xwidgets/Ywidgets and your product does not have that...


Thanks! You know I would love to have you onboard as me and everyone who has seen it loves your work, but it is as you said - Winstep is not a widgets engine.

How is Xwidget doing, by the way? I'm a bit of a lone wolf, so I tend not to pay much attention to what is going on around me.

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 Post subject: Re: Rocketdock gallery is closing - a sad day
PostPosted: Sun Jul 29, 2018 4:41 pm 
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The original, first incarnation of skinz.org was impossible to beat, just about everything else even then looked a bit shite by comparison. And DA always was a pretentious load of.... ;)

I noticed that Wincustomize actually has something it calls 'premium skins/themes', inc. some Winstep ones, that it tries to flog for a ridiculous sum. I remember way back the Frogspawn mouthing the idea - nothing wrong with it in principle, as long as it's a reasonable amount and a reasonable split - but had no idea till recently that he'd actually done it.

Anyway, it's never too late for a dedicated Winstep theme gallery Jorge - as long as the app lives, it'll need new skins and a place to easily find them. Conversely, I can't in all honesty see Winstep thriving indefinitely without new themes and an easy way to find them. (Or to create them - hint, hint! ;) )

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 Post subject: Re: Rocketdock gallery is closing - a sad day
PostPosted: Sun Jul 29, 2018 11:01 pm 
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winstep wrote:
yereverluvinuncleber wrote:
How is Xwidget doing, by the way? I'm a bit of a lone wolf, so I tend not to pay much attention to what is going on around me.


Oh, Xwidget is dead. The developer killed it by being useless in every single conceivable, imaginable way. Here is my final rant which will explain everything:

https://www.deviantart.com/yereverluvinuncleber/journal/Xwidget-1-0-is-officially-dead-confirmed-744016316

Forgive my venom in that rant. That was five-six years of pent-up frustration vented in one emotional explosion. Although it might not seem it - I really am quite nice! So people tell me. :(

You are right that customisation is plummeting in popularity, all that creativity has been stifled by Apple and MS, the latter not realising that customisation of their platform was its strength. MS wants to be another Apple, Windows all locked down and closed from the GUI to its apps. It won't work, it will just kill the platform.


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