RIP Alice-Reworked

[Mordasius]

Alice-Reworked.jpg

It is with little regret that I announce the retirement of Alice-Reworked (nee Alice!) from Deviant Art. The Frankenstein-esque amalgamation of DanteWontDie's artwork with rainmeter skins has served its purpose and deserves to be consigned to the purgatory of unwanted posts.

Alice! - [a Rainmeter Desktop] first made an appearance on 3rd January 2013 as a repack of DanteWontDie's artwork with my Cogs, Tubes and Gauges and Midsummer Chronophage skins. It was posted by a Deviant under the name of ~OmegaLegend (henceforth referred to as HWR for He Who Re-packs), a bottom-feeder that specialises in packing other people's work under his own name. The post made quite a splash and, as I reported on the Cogs, Tubes and Gauges thread, it garnered more than 2,800 favourites in a couple of days.

The 'popularity' of HWR's re-pack was of little concern until I started posting comments on the !Alice - [a Rainmeter Desktop] page informing everyone that I had fixed bugs or made updates to the Cogs, Tubes and Gauges skins and urging them to update the skins from my original post. I had previously sent HWR messages along the lines of "I'm not happy with you re-packing my skins, why don't you just post a screenshot of how you combined them with DanteWontDie's artwork and give links to the originals?" HWR responded by hiding all my comments and flagging me as 'Deviously Denied' meaning I could not post any comments on any of his posts.

It was then that I took inspiration from American Mcgees Alice and slipped a metaphorical kitchen knife in my belt to venture forth with intent to do serious damage to the number of copies of my skins being downloaded from HWR's post. After a few hours work on the backgrounds of skins from the Cogs, Tubes and Gauges collection I posted Alice-Reworked on 23rd January. It was not pretty and certainly nothing that I would ever be proud of, but it served the purpose of deflecting downloads from HWR's post to Alice-Reworked.

There was however, still a trickle of downloads from HWR's post and it was only then that I thought of reporting HWR's post as a Policy Violation. Thanks to the Deviant Art Administrators, HWR's post was deleted within hours of my report on 28th January.

I hadn't reported the post before because I thought that the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 License allowed other people to use your work provided that they gave credit to the original. So Big Thanks to the administrators of Deviant Art and let it be a lesson to all of us posting stuff on DA that low-life packers like HWR can't re-pack our work under their own name even if they do give credit to the original.

It was while checking that HWR's post had really been deleted that I noted that Alice-Reworked was somehow being flagged as the most popular Rainmeter Skin of all time!?

AlicePopular.jpg

WTF thought I. How is it that BlueVision V0.2 Alpha, which was the collection of skins that got me interested in Rainmeter in the first place, could be less popular than Alice-Reworked? The answer seems to be in the number of 'favourites'. No matter that BlueVision V0.2 Alpha had been downloaded 245,626 times verses Alice-Reworked's paltry 1,296 times, the number of favourites for Alice-Reworked (3,381 vs. 1,977) was making Alice-Reworked the 'Most Popular'.

Apologies to anyone that feels they missed out on Alice-Reworked, but I really couldn't live with it heading the list of Rainmeter 'Popular All Time' so I have deleted it.

RIP Alice-Reworked.

P.S. If you are really desperate to get a copy you can send me a PM and I'll oblige.

[moshi]

I hadn't reported the post before because I thought that the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 License allowed other people to use your work provided that they gave credit to the original. So Big Thanks to the administrators of Deviant Art and let it be a lesson to all of us posting stuff on DA that low-life packers like HWR can't re-pack our work under their own name even if they do give credit to the original.

Creative Commons or any other license doesn't force Deviantart to host the files. it's still up to them what they want distribute on their website.

kinda sad you took it down. i am pretty sure time (dowloads&likes/uptime) plays an important part in "popular" algorithm, so after a while everything might have been back to "normal" ... or not and the theme might have proven itself as a bestseller. why not, it's really nice and pretty unique. but we'll never know now ...

[Mordasius]

Two of the Alice: Madness Returns Groups that featured the original Alice-Reworked in their galleries sent messages asking what had happened to the 'Wallpaper' so I relented and re-posted it after tweaking some of the colours and props. I thought that after resetting the favourites, views and download counters, Alice-Reworked (Reborn) would stop creeping onto the 'Popular' pages. Seems I was wrong about that and I will just have to hope that, as moshi suggests, things will settle down over time.

I wasn't aware that "age" was a factor in DA's Algorithm for Popularity but as JeanFan wrote "The algorithm seems to take into consideration a number of things like the "age" of the submission, the "rate" of favorites (presumably both the number of favorites per view rate and number of favorites per time unit rate), the number of views, the number of comments, and so forth."

I suppose one positive thing to come out of plonking the skins on a piece of fan art is that, judging by the comments, a lot of people that like that sort of artwork had not come across rainmeter before but are now running skins on their desktops.

Welcome back Alice!

[moshi]

you might like these:

http://dlanham.com/ui/steampunk/

•)

[Mordasius]

you might like these:

Thanks for the link (did Evi find it or was the Big G responsible?). Even though I appreciate the skill and artistry of ~DanteWontDie's work, I'm far more comfortable with Steampunk so it's back to the mechanical stuff for me. A few hours playing Cogs might give me some ideas.

[moshi]

Dribbble actually: http://dribbble.com/search?q=steampunk
but don't click the link if you don't have plenty of time

hmmm, guess Evi needs a Dribbble search function ....

[Mordasius]

Dribbble actually: http://dribbble.com/search?q=steampunk

Oww. Lots of neat stuff there and it dribbled up 82,079,700,708 pixels in the blink of a camel's eye.

Yes I'm sure Evi should be able to dribble and maybe even search Dribbble too.

[TheFireFox]

I just started using Rainmaker but I seriously love this skin.

Do you have any suggestions for a windows bar replacement/remover whatever, just something to store your random junk normally used in windows (programs, tray icons, trash can) that compliments this skin? Because the standard windows stuff and a desktop full of shortcuts and such kind of screws up the pretty theme :P.
Another theme program or whatever would be fine aswell if that's not available in rainmaker.

One small problem I found, once you open your music player and click on the "change look" bar it disappears and you can't seem to change it back..

Also wonder if you know of anything that could replace the normal utorrent plugin for a (multiple)rutorrent/seedbox interface that connects to sftp or something.
I've been thinking about using something like expandrive to add them as HDD's but you can't really monitor the stats then you can just see the drivesize and browse your seedbox FTP.

Anyway, thanks for the info and the epic theme ^_^.

[Mordasius]

Do you have any suggestions for a windows bar replacement/remover whatever, just something to store your random junk normally used in windows (programs, tray icons, trash can) that compliments this skin?

I've heard Winstep Nexus Dock does a fairly good job and overcomes a few of the niggles and glitches with RocketDock. You might like to use a few of OrmiKoresh's AMA Icon Set to give it an Alice feel.

One small problem I found, once you open your music player and click on the "change look" bar it disappears and you can't seem to change it back..

Thanks for reporting that. I'd left some stuff from Cogs, Tubes and Gauges in the ini file by mistake. I've fixed the problem and uploaded an update to the Alice-Reworked page on Deviant Art.

Also wonder if you know of anything that could replace the normal utorrent plugin for a (multiple)rutorrent/seedbox interface that connects to sftp or something.

The uTorrent skin uses WebUI to access info on uploads and downloads. It looks like rutorrent also has a WebUI but I haven't looked at it so I don't how much would have to be changed in the LUA script that reads it.

[Seahorse]

Sorry to hear about someone taking the mickey over a skin. I hope his next visit to the Gents involves squeezing a hedgehog out...