After weeks of voting, at last we present to you the full list of winners.  These skins and skinners were nominated and voted on by the community.

2007 Skinner of the Year:

It was a tight race, with the lead swapping between several skinners throughout the week, but after all was said and done, one skinner came out ahead and can be crowed the WinCustomize Skinner of 2007:

Night Train

2nd Place: Quentin94

3rd Place: I.R. Brainiac

CursorXP Theme:

1st Place Destkop Warbird Drill'n Boss	2nd Place Curvy Richard Mohler	3rd Place (Tie) Protozoa Chuckeye	3rd Place (Tie) Vienna J. Aroche

DesktopX Widget:

1st Place CitriumXP v3 Fairyy~	2nd Place SD Desktop 4.01 Vad_M	3rd Place RC Radio buzzh58

Rainlendar:

1st Place Eon Richard Mohler	2nd Place Glass Fairyy~	3rd Place Talc Rainlendar Xiandi

Xion Skin:

1st Place Alexis zeolyte	2nd Place Arileen Quentin94	3rd Place Valiant zeolyte

Sysmetrix Skin:

1st Place Earth II don5318	2nd Place Snowflake pinchecl	3rd Place OM System 1024 Pan Yeti

Wallpapers:

1st Place Season's Reflections buzzh58	2nd Place Sands of Time tippytoenail	3rd Place Harmony Leaf PixelZ01

ObjectDock Skin:

1st Place Turbo Tabbed & Side Docks WebGizmos	2nd Place Vienna 2 Spectrum messiah 1	3rd Place Sexy Docks messiah1

DesktopX Theme:

1st Place Eon Richard Mohler	2nd Place ScreenX buzzh58	3rd Place Vista Bug buzzh58

WindowBlinds Skin:

1st Place Citrium Night Train	2nd Place Azkaban WB 5.1 HeirOfSlytherin	3rd Place October Night Train

One of the best and most underused features of WindowBlinds 6 is the colorizing feature.

With WindowBlinds, you can color certain parts of the skin but not others in order to create multiple new styles that you can save for later.

Here are two screenshots to show what I mean:

Above is Elegance but with a more golden hue to it. Note that the close button is still red. It's not just a brute force hue shift.

Here is Aero Executive changed to be grassy.

Once upon a time there was a collection of programs called Object Desktop. The most popular of these programs were WindowBlinds, IconPackager and DesktopX.

Millions of people around the world tried these programs and for the most part liked them. But users also often found it difficult to get a consistent look across their desktop since the different programs worked on different parts of the computer.

In time, a number of skinners helped popularize the concept of "Suites". A suite is a collection of skins, themes, and icons that when applied together create a single unified desktop experience.  However, as cool as suites were, it still required users to go out and find the various programs necessary to apply the suite.

Over the past few years, Stardock has worked hard to find ways to simplify the process of applying suites.  This past year, it devised a new product called MyColors.  The theme and the underlying technology would be one in the same. The suite would evolve into being called a MyColors theme. Users would search for MyColors themes instead of the software. MyColors would seamlessly include all the software needed.

Stardock Design

To sell themes to the mass market, Stardock would need to create a lot of themes. In the past, a handful of art houses like Pixtudio, Skins Factory, and SkinPlant had created a handful of themes.  To make the MyColors concept work, hundreds of high quality themes would need to be made. And so Stardock Design was created.

Stardock Design brought in, full-time most of the top talent from the major art shops that were devoted to skinning.  Alexandrie and Treetog now work full time at Stardock Design. So do both MikeB and Hippy. Stardock also brought in ChaNinja as a full time designer (ChaNinja was one of the top msstyles skinners).  Pixel Pirate, Danilo0c, and Essorant also joined up.  And Voo, well known for his icon creations in contract work with the art houses is now full time as well.

Stardock then licensed a number of properties from movie studios, sports teams, car companies, universities, etc.  Already the NBA, NHL, and NCAA teams are made with more coming on-line.

MyColors 2008

This month, Stardock will make available MyColors 2008.

This second-generation version is designed for the mass audience. MyColors 2008 is self-healing -- it automatically repairs itself if one of the components out of date or a problem in a theme is found or a bug in the underlying technology is found.

A number of major OEMs have already signed on to pre-load MyColors in the next year. In the future, users will be able to choose how they want their computers to look like.

Object Desktop 2008

MyColors will be made part of Object Desktop 2008. In this way, Stardock can provide those users premium themes during the course of the year and offer discounts on many others.

Moreover, MyColors allows users two very straight forward choices now:

The user can:

1. Pay $19.95 and have a branded theme with all the software they need for that particular theme. (i.e. they pay for the theme and the software is largely incidental)
   or
2. Get Object Desktop for $49.95 which provides the underlying software and can use the thousands of skins, themes, icons, etc. out there. (they pay for the software and the themes are largely incidental).

Below are some screen shots of what to expect and how it will work.

MyColors Theme Manager in action.

 
Quest MyColors Theme

Boston Celtics MyColors theme

 
Users can see Featured Themes right from MyColors Theme Manager

You've seen Brad's article on what Stardock needs to do in 2008, and a few of the items touched on WinCustomize and the community specifically.  Now that we're into 2008, I wanted to add my own thoughts on what we accomplished on WinCustomize in 2007, what some of my goals are for '08 and what that means for the community in terms of content, events and opportunities.

Looking Back at 2007:

Vista, Dreams & New Opportunities

2007 was a year of change for Windows customization, there's no doubt about that.  Vista brought with it a completely new set of challenges and opportunities for people looking to tweak their PC to get the most visually and performance-wise.  Stardock brought a lot of new goodies to the table in 2007 specifically for Vista.  WindowBlinds was updated for Vista features, and even brought several Vista visual enhancements to Windows XP.  IconPackager handles Live Folders and the increased image size requirements.  We also updated Skin Studio to take care of all the new WB6 and Vista features.

On top of updating our stable of customization tools, we've added a plethora of new applications that let you further customize and tweak your Windows experience: DeskScapes, SoundPackager, CursorFX.

DeskScapes is without a doubt the biggest new customization tool of 2007.  With Windows Vista Ultimate, animated desktops became much more reasonable and less resource intensive.  On top of the regular DreamScene feature of playing video files, DeskScapes built on that with a new file format to allow authors to retain credit and protect their work, as well as allow for the ability to run dynamic wallpapers.  Animated desktops that weren't pre-rendered video, but dynamically rendered scenes utilizing the graphics card instead of your CPU.

Dreams are our fastest growing content category here at WinCustomize.  In the 11 months since the launch of Windows Vista and DeskScapes, we have received over 400 Dreams from our community.  Every month we've had dozens of outstanding quality dreams, and every month since March, Island Dog has been featuring the best work:

• December 2007
• November 2007
• October 2007
• September 2007
• August 2007
• July 2007
• June 2007
• May 2007
• April 2007
• March 2007

And in February of 2008, DeskScapes 2.0 comes out, making animated wallpapers available to virtually all Vista users.

Sound Packager also finally saw the light of day, giving users the ability to customize even how their PC sounds.  No more manually changing out system sounds one by one, now you can create packages or theme sets of sounds for your system and share them with your friends or the community at large.  It's one thing to customize the look, now you can customize the sound of your PC just as easily.

2007 was all about new choices in Windows customization, and we kept ahead of the curve here at WinCustomize.com.

WinCustomize 2007

In preparation for what we wanted to do for Windows Vista, our web dev team spent months preparing a completely new version of WinCustomize.com.  After years holding together the old code with chewing gum and twine, they went back to the drawing board and rewrote the site for .NET 2.0.  This time, with the knowledge of running and coding the site for 5 years, they built things with an eye towards expandability and stability.  The single biggest improvement you've probably seen from this rewrite is the fact that the site is actually available and loads quickly 99.9% of the time now.  For those of you around in 2006 or earlier, you'll know how much of an achievement that is.

On top of the functional improvements, stability and speed, we also added the ability for community veterans to sell their skinning work through the Master Skins program.  For years these skinners have helped support WinCustomize with their free work, making us the premier site on the web to get skins and customization content, so it was time to give them something back.  Now, Master Skinners can sell their work to an audience of over 2 million folks every month.

On the news and article front, 2006 was the year we revived the news page with updated Monday through Friday.  Tech news, skinning news, random funny stories etc.  We wanted to make WinCustomize an active site again that gave users a reason to come back every single day.  2007 went like this for most of the year, but starting in late summer, the focus shifted from more generic and wide-reaching technology news to news specific to WinCustomize and the skinning community.  Daily and weekly skin features, moderator and skinner picks.  Interviews with master skinners, developers and more.

This summer we also launched the WinCustomize Wiki, a user-driven documentation project that many of you have taken on as your own.  Huge thanks to sViz, Bebi, CerebroJD, Doctor Nick and others for their tireless efforts to make that project a success!

We've also upped the number of contests.  Maxthon, Dreams, periodic give-aways and more.  Outside of the GUI Champs, 2007 was one of the best years to get your hands on free goodies for your skins.

But perhaps the biggest event of 2007 was the Charity/Subscription Drive we held in November/December.  Thanks to your support, and the generosity of several Master Skinners, we raised over $4,200 for Childs Play, a charity dedicated to donating toys, games and movies to children's hospitals around the globe.  The money we raised went directly to the Children's Hospital of Michigan in Detroit and will go to purchase much needed toys and games to lighten up what is otherwise a very dark place.  I'm incredibly proud of what we accomplished and count myself very lucky to be able to work every day with such an outstanding group of people.

On top of all that, we crossed a major milestone in December.  We crossed the 3,000,000 (yes, that's 3 MILLION) user line.  It was in 2005 that we crossed 2 million, and we've just been gaining momentum since.  I can't wait for us to hit 4 million!

Looking Forward to 2008

After everything that happened in 2007, it's hard to imagine how we'll top ourselves in 2008.  Plans however are already in motion to make 2008 a year to remember.  We've got events, projects, contests, and big announcements to make.  New efforts to expand the community in new ways, make what we're already doing even better, and overall helping to bring customization back to the forefront.  You've seen how Stardock plans to advance skinning to a wider audience, well, we're going to be playing a key role in that here.

The 2008 GUI Championships

In 2006, we gave away $12,000 in cash, software and prizes.  JJ Ying walked away with a great Alienware laptop, others got XBoxes, and many others got nice fat checks.  And we did all of that on a website originally written in 2004, and with very little advanced planning.  With all that has happened since then, we've got a list of ideas for the 2008 event as long as my arm.  This year the event will be bigger, with more events, more prizes, and a lot more exposure.  Island Dog and I have discussed the event at length and we're confident the 2008 GUIC will be the single biggest event in the customization world period.

Community Skin Projects

Yesterday I talked briefly about the first new Community Skin project in years.  The effort, being organized by Jafo, aims to do a project on the scale and quality of the original Heavy Equipment.  The community hasn't had many events or projects to rally around in recent years.  As time has gone on, skinners have become more insular, and small groups have started to split off to do their own thing.  Community Skins were a great way to bring everyone together, to pool the great talent of the community and make something really great.  It's for this reason, that the WinCustomize staff decided that the Community Skin project needed to make a comeback.  If this first effort takes hold, expect more in the future. 

WinCustomize v6 (or 2k8)

WinCustomize v5 (2k7) was all about making the site stable, fast, and be able to handle a growing community.  We feel we accomplished that and now it's time to focus on making the site more usable, more inviting and easier to navigate.  We've begun (very) early design work on the site and are excited about the changes coming up.  A big focus across all things Stardock the last year has been on improving the user experience when using our tools.  WinCustomize is one of our largest tools, and its time to bring it fully up to date.  Expect more news, previews, screenshots and more as we get nearer completion.  There will probably be a subscriber-only beta test of the site as well, like there was for v5 early this year.

JoeUser 2

JoeUser is being rewritten completely.  Originally coded in 2003 and largely left alone since, this revamp is significant.  We're taking everything we've learned from both JoeUser and WinCustomize to make a community discussion/blogging site that's very special and unique.  For the WinCustomize community, this is important because JoeUser 2 is a test-bed for many changes and improvements we want to bring over to WinCustomize.  JU2 will have features you'll benefit from here, plus it will grow the community and bring more and more people to WinCustomize, which will in turn expose them to skinning.

JoeUser 2 is getting very close to a testing stage now.  You'll be hearing more about that very very soon.

More Galleries, More Content, More Everything!

We're looking to keep expanding what applications we cover here at WinCustomize.  Over the course of 2008, we'll be adding galleries, and reaching out to more in the skinning application community, and to those in the wider customization community.  WinCustomize is the leader in this area, but there are gaps that others have stepped in to fill.  Working more closely with the rest of the community, forming partnerships with developers and other sites is going to be an important aspect of our work this year.  When one of us is prosperous, all of us benefit.

This means more content of all sorts.  Island Dog, myself, Brad, ZubaZ, Jafo and others have been turning out articles, helping with projects, contests, doing interviews and much more to make sure that you never run out of new things to see or read here on WinCustomize.  And we have even more planned.

2007 was a great year... and 2008 is looking to be even better!  I hope everyone sticks around for the fun and helps make 2008 our best year yet!

Dreams are one of the newest galleries on WinCustomize, having launched at the end of January along side the announcement of DreamScene by Microsoft at CES 2007.  They are the prime example of the possibilities Vista presents in terms of customization and skinning.  Since the launch, it has been one of our most popular galleries, attracting countless new skinners and users looking to get the most out of their Vista Ultimate purchase.

What's impressive is that the success wasn't hindered by the limitation of requiring Vista Ultimate edition.  And with the impending release of DeskScapes 2.0, opening up animated wallpapers to virtually all Vista users, we expect the gallery to explode in popularity in 2008.

The first year for any skinning tool is always rough as artists struggle to learn the new medium and figure out what does and doesn't work, but despite that learning curve, we saw some outstanding Dreams this year.  And they just keep getting better and better.

Below are my picks for the best Dreams of 2007.

What are your picks for 2007 Dreams?

Ok, after just a day and a half of nominations, we have 115 total unique skins, and 13 skinners.  The requirement for a gallery to be voted on was that it have at least 5 skins nominated.  Before we get into the master list, here are the nominated skins that won't make it to a vote:

* The IconPackager list actually received 7 nominations, unfortunately 3 of them were sets from the 2006 GUI Champs, since they weren't 2007 items, they don't qualify.

Now... time for the bigger list... the list of nominated skins that will be appearing in polls over the next 2 weeks to determine which is truly the favorite for 2007!

And now, for the list of skinners nominated for Skinner of the Year 2007:

Voting will start on Monday, December 17th.

Over time, the list of applications supported here on WinCustomize grows and grows.  Gone are the days where you only had a small handful of applications that met all of your skinning needs.  While choice is great, the consequence can be that some tools don't get quite the attention that others do.  There's no question that WindowBlinds is successful, we have thousands of skins from the last 8 or 9 years, and the gallery expands nearly every day.

One of those apps that people forget about, but is absolutely fantastic is ObjectBar, a toolbar utility that comes as part of Object Desktop.  It lets you create start bars, finders, pop-up menus, launchers, docks and so on, and it can all be skinned to match your chosen theme!  It's a stellar utility for any power user who has to keep track of a lot of different applications and tasks. 

Development has kept going, with version 2.1 having been released just yesterday.  So I'm hoping that this article can entice skinners to take another look at the program and start skinning for it again.

Now, why should you care about ObjectBar?  Well, like I said, it's a great tool for anyone who finds themselves managing a lot of different applications, files, folders and misc content on their PC.  I personally have about half a dozen applications open at any given time (not counting IM, IRC, e-mail or web browsers) that I need to do my job.  I have files on my desktop, on external drives, and various locations across the network that I regularly have to update and reference.  Having a bunch of shortcuts on my desktop just wouldn't cut it.

And of course, not only do I need a utility to help me manage all of these items, I need it to look good too!  Now, ObjectBar does come with some outstanding skins, and it has the ability to try and match your current WindowBlinds skin, but sometimes that just doesn't do it for me.  Even the skin matching isn't always enough since it does match parts of the skin, but sometimes it will match less interesting parts (like the skin I'm using now uses gray bars with spashes of color at the edges and for buttons, the ObjectBar matches to a gray bar.  No splashes of color.  Kind of boring).  In those cases, you'll want to download a skin designed for the tool.  And skins can go beyond just visual enhancements, they can add actual utility.

Currently, we have one gallery for ObjectBar 1 and another one for ObjectBar 2.  ObjectBar 2 will actually run all v1 skins, so we'll be consolidating them in the near future, but for now you have two galleries to browse through when looking for skins.

• ObjectBar
• ObjectBar 2

Here are a few of my favorite skins for ObjectBar.

WindowBlinds 6 has been a big deal for us the last few months with all the new capabilities it brings to skinning Windows Vista and Windows XP.  Combined with the new version of SkinStudio, we're expecting a renewed interest in skinning and a jump in great content to pick from on the site.  Though, for a lot of people, they look at screenshots and recent skins and go "Meh, so what?  What's so new about this?" 

Sometimes I guess it's hard to see what's changed when you've followed every incremental update to the software.  So, I thought it'd be fun to step through the WindowBlinds Gallery and get a look at what skins have looked like over the history of WindowBlinds.  To do this, I went through to the first skins on the site and started moving forward in time, so I could see what all has changed.  Personally, it amazes me how different skins are now versus then.

So lets step into the wayback machine and see what we find...

1998
While WinCustomize itself wasn't around back then, we did manage to pull in a bunch of skins from the years BWC (Before WinCustomize) so our gallery had that historical perspective.

• ObjectDesktop 2001

The very first skin in our WinCustomize gallery is from December 30th, 1998, the Object Desktop 2001 skin from none other than Frogboy himself.  If the date on the skin is to be trusted, this even predates the 1.0 version of WindowBlinds, which according to the Wiki, wasn't released until September of 1999[1].

While this doesn't hold the honor of being SkinID 1 (that was removed by the original author), it is likely the oldest WindowBlinds skin you'll ever come across.

• PDA

Yet another skin by Frogboy, who you'll find frequently mentioned in the archives, back in the day when he had more free time to skin.

(we hear he's busy "running a company" now... psssh whatever!)

• Holiday

This is the first skin in the gallery that isn't attributed to Frogboy, and the first (of what will be many) holiday themed skin.  Built and uploaded by Masashi Ickikawa, a user so old I can't even find them in the database, it shows off how skins don't just have to be techy inspired and can be more fun and light.

Oh, and it's technically the lowest Skin ID on the site, clocking in at SkinID 5

1999

At first, you'll notice that most skin previews were of a skinned notepad window and a bit of text with the skin name and author information.  Things changed though in early 1999, skinners moved away from notepad previews to shots that showed off more of the skin elements themselves (windows, boxes, buttons etc.)

• Destruction

Originally posted in June of 1999, Destruction by Decoder is a great example of the new preview method people began using.  The skin itself is a nice example of how skins began to evolve away from emulations of other operating systems, and move more into being original creations and designs.

Imagine how much more popular Windows 98 would have been with a default interface like this.

• LCARS V

Oh, it's an LCARS skin!  By "Death" in June of 1999, this skin shows off the ability to use more complex image elements in window borders.  It's a great example of how folks really started to get creative with their skins, and didn't necessarily care about keeping it small if it meant a cooler look.

• Total Annihilation

Video game inspired skins can be some of the coolest and most visually interesting out there when done right.  This is, from what I can tell, the second such skin in the gallery (the first being Zerg Viscid by BaT).

GGame skins have been in short supply in recent years, I'd love to see them make a comeback.\

• 100_Camels

The fourth skin by DavidK really shows off how people start to take incredibly creative directions with their WindowBlinds skins.  It's a great example of artists transforming the user interface into something that no one really imagined before.

This is also a great skin to peek at since it's an early entry from one of the community's most veteran skinners.  Nice to see where they started.

 

• StardockOJ

I wanted to toss this one onto the list before closing 1999 out because it shows a skin preview generated by BuilderBlinds, the predecessor to SkinStudio.  Just another glimpse at how much things have changed over the years.

StardockOJ is a pretty interesting skin by CRUMBUT.

So that brings us from the first skins, the ones before even WindowBlinds 1.0 was out, up to some of the first skins using WindowBlinds 2 (beta) features and the first glimpses of BuilderBlinds previews. 

In Part 2, we'll cover 2000 - 2003 to show the evolution from WindowBlinds 2.0 to 4.0, the version that really started catching people's attention.  Expect that later this week.

SoundPackager is one of those applications that people have seemingly been talking about for ages, always wondering when it would finally materialize.  Well, last month we finally pushed a beta of SoundPackager out the door and testing/tweaking began in earnest.  To go along with this, we launched a new gallery at WinCustomize just for SoundPackager files (.soundpackage).   The entire idea behind SoundPackager is that if you wanted to customize your Windows sounds previously, you'd have to navigate to some obscure control panel, and one-by-one manually set every sound event.  What if you wanted to share your sound schemes?  You were more or less out of luck.

SoundPackager lets you create a unique sound scheme in a simple and easy-to-use UI, and then wrap it all up in a .soundpackage file to hand off to anyone else running SoundPackager.

Now, why should you care about SoundPackager or the ability to share or download themed sound packs?  Well, we've managed to customize every visual aspect of your Windows PC.  We've done skins, icons, cursors, wallpapers, animated wallpapers, widgets, media players and more.  So we've covered our visual bases, but not audio.  Lets say you found yourself with a killer Halloween theme and wanted some spooky sounds to really round out the ghastly experience?  Well, now you're in luck since we have just such a SoundPackager theme in the gallery for you to grab.

This also opens up WinCustomize to creative types who lean more towards sound and music.  So now we are open to traditional 2D artists, 3D artists, animators, and audio artists.

Here are a few of my favorite items currently in the SoundPackager gallery: