How many people have sreens that small now a days?
Afaik, they don't make screens smaller than 1440x990 anymore. So the screen size shouldn't be a problem imo.
And there's nothing wrong with the dock being avaliable, you don't even have to turn it on if you don't want to.
Except that the dock is on by default-or at least was when I installed Impulse, and I've seen several pseudo-complaints about it since, so my guess is it hasn't changed.
To my knowledge, 1024x768 screens are still being made, or at the very least are still buyable. There's also the fact that some people, like my father for instance, have visual problems and tend to run at a lower resolution than is recommended/their hardware actually supports, although this is less relevant on a CRT or even a newer LCD. For the record, he runs his system at 800x600, and if it supported 640x480, he'd probably run it at that. (Note: It will run it at 640x480 in safe mode, and either 16 or 256 colors to boot-I forget-but it's not technically a supported mode and therefore not selectable).
I've tried to tell him he can scale up the size of everything when he goes to a higher resolution, but he hasn't paid much attention.
Smaller is better.
Fast load should be off by default.
I fully agree on the load time-ideally I wouldn't wait any longer than I waited with SDC, but I understand that may be difficult to accomplish.
Turning the dock off by default should be more than sufficient, but placing it as a free download works too.
Doesn't bother me one way or the other, but it'd be nice to only have 2-4 tabs "active".
Don't know what you mean by less space-less screen space? Sounds good. Less hard drive space? Should be a non-issue, but is generally a good thing. (Note: I can't see the screenshot because Stardock's network of sites is inaccessible to me at the moment through my ISP, so I'm having to use TOR, which has really really shitty thoroughput.)
Like more direct installable demos. SDC had like 500 (okay, not really) demos on it, and my brain remembers the vast majority of them as direct install (rather than downloading an installer), although that doesn't appear to be the case. I was unable to get the Sins demo installer to work for some strange reason that Annatar, Kitkun, later Yarlen, and myself were not able to track down-but Yarlen directed me to where Impulse has an option to show direct downloadable demos, which worked. Which incidentally I feel that hides fairly well, although I can understand it not being in the default on position.
Although, yes, more completely free stuff is good too-in fact, great. I'm not sure exactly what the idea behind this is at present though, other than the MyColors thing.
And just as a last thing, the blue orb needs to have a big fat CLICK ME when people hover over it, or something. The most commonly asked question about Impulse has to be "how do I...?" to which the answer is "click the blue orb". But this is something that's been said 5 billion times so hopefully it makes it in sooner or later.