BlueStacks: Yep, I can now slice virtual fruit ON MY PC!!!

As though today's office workers don't have enough to distract them from being productive, BlueStacks has now released the Beta version of its Android app emulator for desktop PCs.  I've played around with it on my own work computer for about a half hour now (hey, boss, I'm writing a blog post on this, don't look at me like that!) and I can officially confirm: You will be able to slice virtual fruit and launch cartoon birds on a slingshot from the comfort of your desktop computer.  And that is very cool.

That said, there are a couple, shall we say, horrifically annoying features I encountered on the BlueStacks app that already have me punching at the "UNINSTALL" button:

• The ads.  Yes I know that BlueStacks needs to sell ads to monetize its app and make all this content available to us for free but there are just way too my ads that pop up at just about all the time.  After just one round of Fruit Ninja, I was subjected to a 30-second vodka ad that I had no way of disabling or even skipping after a certain length of time.  The fact that such ads come up every time you finish a single session of the game is just infuriating.
• BlueStacks never goes away.  Seriously, I can't find anyway to make the BlueStacks icon go away when I'm not using it.  I'm looking at it right now as I can't even cover it up with my browser, my word processor, my email or anything.  It's just sitting up there, persistently in the upper right-hand corner of my monitor, with no way to "x" it out.  Even right-clicking on the thing doesn't make it go away or present me with a menu of options that would help me make it go away.  I get that BlueStacks really, really wants you to use their app but this sort of thing is just intrusive -- why not just put the app in my start folder and let me access it when I want to?

At any rate, you can download BlueStacks from the company website if you want.  Personally I'm about to uninstall the thing until they make it less obnoxious to use.