360DT; Worth your Shillings

[Cheshire Wolf]

Design - Flawless

Excution - Flaw-full? Maybe not

I:

(+) Features

(-) Advertisement

A company has to many money someway, and on a product with such an innovative design as this one could only hope they'd have came up with something a little better than pop-up advertisement, but they didn't.

360Desktop offers you a full 360? panoramic virtual desktop environment. Offering you a similar experience to that of the Android or iPhone mobile operating systems. While not the prettiest it is simple and effective.

By offering the full panoramic view it makes things easier than pressing a button to jump to a whole new virtual desktop, however, they have not expanded upon this well enough yet. I would have loved to see the ability to drag a file across screen and having the screen automatically moving along the virtual desktop.

Social Integration is the key to this virtual desktop product. 360Desktop has implanted its own widget & wallpaper system allowing major companies, open source developers, or even yourself to create wallpaper packs and fun web widgets that can be downloaded directly to the software.

Web Clipping is an especially nice feature allowing you to take a web page or a piece of a web page directly from the internet and place it on your desktop. However, I found this feature rather clunky and would rather open multiple versions Firefox and place them in different area's of the desktop.

II:

(-)Interface

(-)Buggy

(+)Performance

(+)Upgrade Value

As mentioned perviously the interface is simple and easy to use, but without the ability to customize the desktop's wallpaper directly from it or changing the position of the interface it is maybe to simple?

The interface also lacks many customization options, and interferes with the windows 7 taskbar if you have it at the top of the screen, but as I mentioned you can't change positions.

While running the application I found that sometimes pieces of other windows would "tag along" for the ride to another section and mess up the complete flow of my desktop.

Ah, this ran extremely smooth for me. Almost as if it was part of the desktop itself. It didn't weigh my processor down. Didn't suck my ram out from under me. It's quite good at performing well. Even the pop-ups didn't slow it down in the speed of transition from one area to another, just in productivity.

All these "Bad Problems" you hear people talking about can simple be gotten rid of by paying 3 dollars a month and upgrading to the full version, but I don't think anyone has bothered, or most even know about the full version. So I will quote directly from the website:

"* Ad-free 360desktop and gallery browsing - no ads delivered into the 360desktop QuickNav or into the Gallery

* 10 free credits each month to tip your favorite 360's - content creators make real cash from every tip you give them.

* Access to advanced authoring and viewing features - make private 360's for personal use

* Share 360's with only friends and family you nominate. Access and download "restricted" rated 360's

* Access to priority support - jump the queue, with priority level technical support

* Pro tester program membership - get the first access to our new features and products

* Unlimited 360 downloads - no restrictions to the number of 360's that you can download"

When I get paid I will get the software's pro version for one month and test it. I will than update my review and tell you if it is worth it or not, but from I'm sitting. It's major problem was pop-ups and that gets taken care of.

Do I think this software has a future? Yes, however, they need to listen to their community. They need to provide direct ability to manipulate wallpapers from the program. They need to give us a skinning engine. They need to fix the few bugs, and FFS Give me the ability to change position of the damn box.

On the other end of things the community needs to give it a chance. Not just see "Oh Ads" and leave it be. Try out the 3 dollar version.

Software: http://360desktop.com/

Discuss?