Late last night I released Renew. Renew is a new application based off the time tested Looking Glass engine. A couple of months ago while handling some Looking Glass related business it occurred to me that the engine itself could be used to virtually download anything as a desktop image. The exact time that the idea for Renew occurred to me has unfortunately been lost to the ages.
With Looking Glass the user selects a webcam and displays the feed from that camera, one of the tradeoffs of using live images is the quality is normally very poor. What Renew does is scour the web for desktop images and adds them to a giant randomized list. Renew at a set interval downloads an image from this list and uses it as your desktop picture. The result is thousands of full quality images from all over the internet.
There was some hesitation to ever program Renew because the images it was finding and downloading did in no way belong to Dragon Forged Software. All the images it finds are on publicly accessible free desktop websites. Since the license for the images is typically for private and personal use we would be unable to bundle them with Renew in anyway, without contacting thousands of artist and photographers. This would also swell the size of renew to a couple of gigabytes. To keep everything on the up and up Renew downloads these images in exactly the same way that you would with a web browser, it does not store the images locally or on our servers at all. As a benefit this also means the Renew is constantly evolving and finding new images as well as removing images that are no longer available. This creates a constantly new and fresh desktop.
Renew was released in what we call a cold release. It is a technique that I have used for the last three software releases I have done. The software is released but we do not tell anyone. Only people who stumble across the website are aware that there is new software available. In the event that the software has a major bug the amount of effected users is much lower then would be with a typically full scale launch. Tuesday I will send out my normal press releases, thursday when initial demand has cooled I will publish to the update sites, and next week I will look into promotional ads on mac related websites. The software is slowly released over a period of about a week, which also greatly reduces the surge on our website as well.
I hope everyone enjoys Renew and I look forward to hearing back from our users with suggestions for future releases.
Thanks for posting