Software Dynamics Product History

Product History
We have developed several award-winning products including After Dark for Windows, it’s predecessor Magic ScreenSaver and Operation: Inner Space. We're best known for developing Windows applications for a worldwide audience, but we started out writing custom one-off software for specific clients including real-time control/data acquisition systems and multimedia presentations. Custom development work was interesting, but not nearly as lucrative or satisfying as writing software for the mass-market. Below are details of our mass-market products to date.

Product Development Highlights:
Magic ScreenSaver >> After Dark for Windows >> Operation: Inner Space >> Power Drawers

Magic ScreenSaver

Our first mass-market software package was the Magic ScreenSaver for Windows.

Magic was developed in the prehistoric days of Windows 2.x in 1989 shortly after Ian Macdonald joined the company. It was the first Windows application we developed and was initially an experiment to figure out how to program for Windows. Although making a screen saver is now trivial, in 1989 it was a new thing that was extremely difficult to figure out how to do. We liked Magic so much that we posted it on the primitive 1989 version of the internet and were deluged with email and letters from pleased users who wanted to pay us for it and license it at their companies, even though we had not asked for payment when we posted Magic.

It's hard to imagine now, but there were only 250,000 Windows users in the world and only 20% of them were on the internet. Even so, just by distributing the functional Magic demo through the internet with no advertising, we garnered a large number of sales to corporations and individuals around the world. We were sufficiently impressed with the response that we dropped everything and made Magic a lot better as both a screensaver and password protection system and worked out a license fee scale. The response was even more positive with huge numbers of orders. We realized we had started something big.

Magic was licensed for hundreds of thousands of corporate and individual customers including most high-tech and Fortune 500 companies (such as Microsoft, DuPont, Hewlett-Packard), and governments on every continent. It was obvious that a better commercial version of Magic that was sold in stores everywhere would be a huge hit. For more information about Magic, visit the Magic ScreenSaver page. To download the latest version, visit the Magic Download page.

After Dark

Although our success with Magic (see above) made it obvious to us that a commercial Windows screen saver would sell millions, not everyone agreed.

We approached Berkeley Systems to publish our commercial screen saver in stores but they resisted, saying "If PC users were cool enough to appreciate screen savers, they would have bought a Mac." They were worried about being ostracized by the Mac community and didn't believe the Windows platform had a future.

In spite of the elitist Mac-centric attitude of the publisher, we got After Dark for Windows done and released to the world. After Dark was the fulfillment of the vision started with Magic. It took an enormous number of 18 hour days to get Version 1.0 finished to our standards. With a smooth user interface and many amusing animations, After Dark was an instant sensation. It wasn't just a big seller and the #1 selling software in the world for a time, it became a pop icon featured in television shows, cartoons and films all over the world. Version 2.0 was a great deal more work and was even more popular. Our success with both Magic and After Dark turned screen savers from a tiny niche into a huge business with a vast array of competing products. Our products alone were (and are) used by about 20 million users.

Unfortunately, after creating an incredibly successful product and a huge income stream for the publisher, we lost control of After Dark to the publisher, Berkeley Systems and it has since gone downhill technically and financially. Since Berkeley was bought by Sierra Online which was bought by someone else, we don't know who currently owns After Dark. Ironically, sales in Magic, our simpler screen saver, did not stop when After Dark was released. Despite our efforts to actively steer new and existing customers to After Dark, Magic sales continued to grow after After Dark was released and most Magic users were so satisfied that they did not switch to the new product.

It's been great making products that millions of users truly enjoy. Users often tell us that our screensavers are often the one thing on their computer that is not a cause of frustration. Having so many users running our software constantly has prompted us to deliver the highest level of quality in both engineering and tech support. It's interesting to note that the vast array of screen savers from many different companies, including those built into Windows, would not exist if not for our ground-breaking work with Magic and After Dark. For more information about Magic and After Dark, visit the Magic ScreenSaver page.

Operation: Inner Space

After thousands of hours building more than 60 different screen saver displays for millions of users (see Magic and After Dark above), we wanted to break new ground again.

Making computer games was the natural next step because the multimedia and toy value aspects of our screen savers overshadowed the useful features such as screen protection and password security. We wanted to provide an intelligent, funny interactive experience that was unique for each user, something so adaptable and interesting that even after thousands of hours of play time, a user could still be amused and pleasantly surprised by it. Games should be fun delivery systems, not things where you sit back and marvel at how cool it looks.

Part of the ambitious game concept was to make a fun world inhabited by truly intelligent computer players. The real world is not populated by malevolent drones, but by complex people who are your equal. We envisioned computer players that embodied anger, loyalty and fear, learned from the user's behavior and would make the game much more fun and interesting. For example, if you killed a computer character for no reason, his friends would hunt you down and seek vengeance. Likewise, after saving a computer player from an attacker, he and his friends would remember and help you later in the game. The idea was not to teach morals, just to make the game more fun with realistic consequences for good and bad actions.

Our product vision translated into Operation: Inner Space, a combination action/strategy game and screen saver created for Windows 3.x in 1992. Users and critics loved the game and found the subtle computer AI compelling. Inner Space offered each user a unique game experience suitable for players of any age with a focus on fun, addictive play action. Inner Space continues to be played by many users who bought it long ago (sometimes more than a decade ago), a unique anomaly in gaming where the average lifespan is a few months. Inner Space continues to be purchased by users for Windows 95, 98, NT, Me and Windows XP even though Inner Space is a 14 year old 16-bit application.

Power Drawers 2000

At our Dynamic Karma division, the company motto is productivity is our passion.

While the standard Windows interface is familiar to many users, some parts of the interface are slow, inefficient and overly complicated. Windows is not as easy or productive as it could be. As both Windows developers and users since the early days of Windows 2.x, we wanted a faster, easier way to work without radically changing Windows. We asked ourselves "How could Windows be made faster, easier and better organized? What would make Windows a more powerful interface to information?" Power Drawers 2000 is what we created to answer that question.

Power Drawers is an application that improves the Windows user interface so that you can access, find, and manage files and folders in a faster and more organized way. By minimizing the effort and time it takes to navigate the operating system and get information, you get more time to concentrate on what you really want to do with your computer. Power Drawers is our best product to date, a serious productivity tool that we depend on every day as an indispensable improvement to Windows. See the Power Drawers Features and About Power Drawers pages for product details.