Dynamic Karma Product History

Product Highlights
We have designed developed many original award-winning products including Power Drawers, After Dark for Windows, it’s predecessor Magic ScreenSaver and Operation: Inner Space. This work is in addition to many products we have designed, architected and developed under contract for the top software companies in the world. The products listed below are only our original designs. We're best known for developing mass-market Windows® applications for a worldwide audience, but we also do top-quality contract work for clients who want the very best in software design and development.

A sampling of our original design work:

Product Development Highlights:


Magic ScreenSaver	After Dark	Inner Space	power drawers

Magic ScreenSaver

Our first mass-market software package was the Magic ScreenSaver which was also the world's first Windows® screensaver.

Magic was developed in the prehistoric days of Windows 2.x in 1989. 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 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 for Windows

Although our success with Magic (see above) made it obvious to us that a commercial screen saver for Windows® 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 ScreenSaver page.

Operation: Inner Space

After many years defining the screen saver genre and building more than 60 different animated displays for tens of 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 users valued our screen savers as much for toy value as for useful 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. 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, independent people. 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, attacking or helping computer characters should lead to predictable consequences, just like real life. The idea was just to make the game more fun with realistic consequences for everything the user does.

Our vision translated into Operation: Inner Space, released in 1994 as the first true action/strategy game for Windows. Users and critics loved the game and found the subtle computer AI compelling. Many Inner Space users continue to play it up to 7 years after they bought it, an extreme anomaly in gaming where the average lifespan is a few months. Inner Space even continues to be purchased by new users of the latest Windows versions even though it is a 16-bit app for Windows 3.1 that was not designed or updated for 32-bit operating systems.

power drawers

At Dynamic Karma, 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. We wanted a better 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 is what we created to answer that question.

Power Drawers® makes Windows® a faster and easier interface to organize and access files. By minimizing the time and effort it takes to get to files and information, you get more time to concentrate on what you really want to do with your computer. Imagine saving 1/2 hour a day. Now imagine everyone in your office working that much faster every day. Power Drawers is our best product to date, a serious productivity tool that we depend on every day as an indispensable improvement to Windows. It is also the first of a new line of productivity tools, all geared to helping users work faster and easier.

See Power Drawers Features and About Power Drawers for product details.