Another month has come and gone, and Summer is rapidly approaching.  Typically, that is a slower time for skinning, but the way things have been going we might just keep this momentum going!  Now for the past month or so you have heard me talk about the 3rd WinCustomize Skinning Contest. 

Well the contest is over, and the winners have been announced.  Congrats to everyone who entered, all the entries were outstanding and hope to see more from everyone.

Now for this weeks picks!

	StealthOS DX Bar 1280 for DesktopX Themes by PuterDudeJim StealthOS is one of my all time favorite WindowBlinds skins.  PuterDudeJim has created an awesome DX Bar that matches perfectly.
	Poubel Red Sky in Dreams by brenopoubel Brenopoubel is back again this week with another fantastic addition to the .dream gallery.
	Artifice for ObjectDock Backgrounds by philmar83 Artifice was the winning WindowBlinds skin in the 3rd WC Community contest, and the only thing my desktop was missing was a matching set of tabbed docks.
	Organic for ObjectDock Backgrounds by Xiandi This is based on the Organic IP, and these compliment it beautifully.  I can't wait to see what else comes from the Organic idea.
	Sidebar Player for Vista Sidebar Gadgets by MikeB314 This media player is designed for the Vista sidebar, and although it's "basic", it's a perfect fit for the sidebar.  Great job.
	On Chesapeake Bay in Wallpapers by kenwas This wallpapers puts a beautiful scene on the desktop.  Be sure to check his personal page for more great works.
	No Load Limit Xion (DS) for Xion by zakai1369 Here is another Xion skin made to match the popular "No Load Limit" WindowBlinds skin.  Nice work.

Great job to everyone featured this week.  Keep an eye out soon for the next edition of This Month in Dreams as well.  See you next week!

The end of the month is near....again!  Time goes by so fast these days, and it seems hard to keep up with all the skins coming in.  Good thing you have TWiS to look forward to every week.

Speaking of the skins on WinCustomize, be sure to check out the latest article and screencast on navigating the WinCustomize galleries.

Now for this weeks picks!

	Federation for Bootskins by Grilka A Star Trek bootskin.  Need I say more?
	Chip Circuit for CursorFX by TOMPCpl TTOMPCpl is really turning out some fantastic cursors.  His latest has a "computer" feel to it.
	Weather Lab 6.0 for Vista in DesktopX by Vad_M This is an incredible gadget.  There is just too much to explain to make sure to check this one out.
	Poubel Vista in Dreams by brenopoubel I can always count on brenopoubel to come up with some fantastic landscape based .dreams.  Great work on this one.
	Dark Shine for IconPackager by sunx This was an entry in the '06 GUI Champs.  This icon pack has a beautiful, detailed design that will go great with many WindowBlinds skins.
	No Load Limit Backgrounds for ObjectDock by WebGizmos Here is a perfect set of matching dock backgrounds, both tabbed and side docks, for the new "No Load Limit" WindowBlinds skin.
	Unearthly Reality in Wallpapers by PhoeniXLengenda This is a really stunning wallpaper.  Great job.
	Summer nights in Wallpapers by Richard Mohler Another beautiful wallpaper from Richard Mohler.  It's a real nice scene, which should make some of you in colder environments a bit warmer.
	iPhonix for WindowBlinds by othersnow This is a real nice and simple skins for Vista.  It works well, and is pretty simple on the eyes.  Nice work.

Another great feature week!  This weeks wallpaper gallery was especially full this week, and there were so many more I wanted to feature.  Take some time and take a quick browse through there, I'm sure you will find something awesome.  See you next week!

WinCustomize gets an incredible amount of visitors each month, and a great many of them are new or first time users along with the regular community members.  Now whether you are a new member or a long time member, navigating through the galleries of WinCustomize might not be fully known by our users.

With that being said, I wanted to give an overview on how to navigate the galleries here on WinCustomize.  We have a wide range of galleries from wallpapers, cursors, WindowBlinds skins, and much more.  We also have categories for these galleries that can make finding what you are looking for a bit easier, but not everyone is aware of how to do this.

Gallery Navigation

Clicking the Gallery button in the main navigation header will take you to the gallery page.  Obviously, you can go directly to your gallery of choice by clicking the specific gallery on right, but we will get started in the main gallery page to show off some of its features.

At the top of this page we have more links to common pages like cursors, visual styles, etc.  Below that we have some other sections where users can get a better view of certain skins.

• Newest: This section will show the latest skins submitted to the public gallery.  A preview is shown of the latest six skins, and clicking the newest skins link will take you to a full gallery page showing the latest skins.
  
• Most Popular Skins: Here you will find the most popular skins by downloads.  At the top of this page you can sort by specific library, and from the last 30 days, the "hall of fame" or from yesterdays count.
  
• Recently Featured:  Skins are often featured on the front page of WinCustomize.  This section allows you to sort through the skins that have been featured.
  
• Recently Updated Skins:  Skins that were recently updated are displayed here.
  
• Top Skinners:  Clicking here will show you the top skinners in various categories, and you can select different viewing options from the menu at the top.
  
• Top Master Skins:   Master Skinners on WinCustomize can sell their skins.  This section shows off some of the most popular Master skins.

Navigating through Categories

One library that this will be very useful for is the ObjectDock gallery, so I will use this as the example, but the other galleries function the same way.  Under the main site navigation you will see the breadcrumb links.  You will see these in all the galleries on WinCustomize.

Next to each text link you will notice the arrow buttons.  Clicking one of these will open a menu allowing your a variety of sub-category choices depending on which you click.  Lets say you are looking in the ObjectDock gallery, and want to find a nice set of tabbed dock backgrounds for ObjectDock Plus.  Clicking the arrow next to "ObjectDock" will give me the menu seen below.

By selecting the "Tabbed Backgrounds" link, it will filter the gallery to show only tabbed backgrounds.

You don't have to stop there either.  You can filter it even more with settings like amount of downloads, newest, ratings, etc. 

Sorting Galleries

So we have gone through how to navigate through the different sub-categories in the gallery sections, and now we will cover just sorting through the galleries.  By default, when you enter any of the galleries on WinCustomize you will see the skins in order of the newest first.  This is great, but clicking the drop-down menu above the gallery will give you more sorting choices.

You can sort the galleries by:

• Downloads Overall
• Downloads Today
• Featured Skins
• Last Updated
• Newest Skins
• Skin Name
• Skin Rating

WindowBlinds Advanced Filters

With the addition of WindowBlinds 6 and Windows Vista skinning, the WindowBlinds gallery has an added filter that will show WB skins that are WindowBlinds 6 ready, Vista ready, or both.  Clicking one of these three links will filter the galleries appropriately.

You can also know which WindowBlinds skins are WB6 or Vista ready by looking for the icons as seen below.

Edit Displayed Libraries

On the right side navigation of WinCustomize, you will see links to some of the various galleries.  By clicking "edit" you can easily add or remove galleries from that list so you can see only the galleries you are interested in.

Simply select or deselect the check buttons for the gallery you want to change.

Conclusion

Hopefully this guide will help you navigate through WinCustomize more easily, and help you find the skins you are looking for.  If you still have questions or suggestions, please feel free to visit the forums.  More guides on other parts of WinCustomize will also be available soon.

Navigating WinCustomize Screencast

Version 6

I have to admit, I'm pretty excited about SkinStudio 6. Which is surprising in some respects because I was deeply involved in the design of SkinStudio 1 through 5.  With SkinStudio 6, the WindowBlinds team wrote it with my part being mostly that of providing input rather than design direction. 

SkinStudio 1 through 5 was designed to provide a quasi-Corel Draw style user interface.  The design worked out well in the early days when WindowBlinds wasn't that powerful.

Here is what SkinStudio 5 looked like:

As you can see, it got pretty complicated by version 6.

By contrast, SkinStudio 6 looks like this:

The difference is application designer versus task oriented design.  That is, with SkinStudio 6, the skinner simply walks through a series of steps and at the end has a finished skin. 

How this will affect the skinning community remains to be seen. But we now have a way for people to easily make their own skins. And best of all, SkinStudio is FREE.

This screencast is a companion to the article I wrote about creating and recoloring Windows icons using IconDeveloper 2.0.  The full tutorial can be found here.

Link: IconDeveloper: Creatings and Coloring Icons from Images

If you have trouble viewing the video, click here for the video.

After a year of rewriting SkinStudio from scratch, Stardock has released SkinStudio 6.

SkinStudio is a free program designed to make it easy for people to create WindowBlinds skins.  Version 6 has been completely rewritten to provide a much simpler user experience for creating skins.

Making your own skins

SkinStudio makes it a snap to design your own skins for WindowBlinds.  When a user desires to create a new skin, they start out with either Luna (if it's on Windows XP) or Aero (if it's on Windows Vista). From there, they can change as much or as little as they want of a given skin.

As users go through the different parts of the Windows GUI, they can replace different elements with new images. The WindowBlinds skinning engine is extremely flexible allowing for the repositioning of buttons, independent border sizing, animation, and much more.

A Completed Skin

A complete looking skin will have all new title bars, borders, buttons, Start menu, taskbar, etc.  It can provide a dramatically different look and feel to your PC.  You can share your creations with others on many different websites including WinCustomize.com, deviantART, Customize.org, Skinbase.org and many others.

A completed skin

SkinStudio Pro

Stardock also offers SkinStudio Pro for skinners who are really into skinning or looking to make skins professionally. SkinStudio Pro lets skinners look at the actual underlying code of a given section and includes a live animation editor for Start menu animations (WindowBlinds 6 includes 30fps start menu animations as seen in Dragon). SkinStudio Pro is $19.95.

SkinStudio Pro adds features for pro skinners like animation editing, code review, etc.

Download: www.skinstudio.net

Introduction

IconDeveloper 2.0 from Stardock was recently released, so what a better time than now to start some walkthroughs about it.  IconDeveloper doesn't get as much attention as other Object Desktop applications, but it's one of the best ones out there for icon creation and modification.

IconDeveloper is not an icon image "editor", what it does is allows users to create their icon with graphics applications such as Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro, then import them into IconDeveloper where you can create the icon in various formats. 

With IconDeveloper you can easily import a variety of image formats, change the color of icons, do batch conversions, and create new sizes of icons using scaling techniques

Getting Started

IconDeveloper is part of the Object Desktop suite, where you can download it from Stardock Central.  There is a free download available to anyone who wishes to give IconDeveloper a look through first.  Starting IconDeveloper you will be presented with a screen that offers a couple of choices.

1. Create a new icon. This allows you to create a new blank icon.Here you have the choice to:
2. Open an existing icon. Here you can edit an icon or an icon library.
3. Convert image to icon. This is a quick way to turn an image into an icon.
4. Recolor an icon. You can recolors icons and icon packages here.

We will start by converting an image to an icon, as this is one of my favorite abilities.  For my example I am going to take an icon I created a .PNG image in Photoshop for a friends application.  I just select the "Convert image to icon" button, and a dialog box prompts me to browse to the graphic of my choice.  Just select the graphic, and IconDeveloper will give you an option to select the icon size and color depth.

Clicking the Alpha Channel button in the lower left corner will bring you a dialog that will allow you to choose a transparent color.  Since I used a .PNG with the transparency already set, I'm going to leave it as default.As you see in the screenshot above, you can first start off by naming your icon, and selected if it's Vista ready or "other" sizes that are available.  For our tutorial today, I'm going to select "Vista ready" only and that will select the 256x256, 96x96, 48x48px, 32x32, and 16x16 sizes.  You will also notice that each icon will have a preview of that selected size.

Choosing OK will then let IconDeveloper import the image, and create the icon formats that were selected.  Once that is done, your icon will be previewed along with all the other sizes shown in the left side menu. 

Recolor the icon

Selecting the Coloring tab brings you to the window where you have the option to recolor your icon.  If you want to just alter the color slightly, or make your icon a complete new color, IconDeveloper can do that for you without having to open an image editor program.

The next step is choosing the range of colors to change, and this can be adjusted by moving the slider to the desired position.  I'm going to move it to about the halfway mark for now.  The last step is to actually recolor the icon by taking the Hue slider and moving it to the desired position which will change the color.  I gave mine a lighter, and once I'm satisfied with the results, hit Apply and the icons will be recolored. First, take the dropper and select the color you wish to change.  For me, I'm going to select the blue color which is the main color of my image.  If you are feeling adventurous you can select the RGB value by itself.  The selected color should show up, and we can move on to the next step.

Saving and Exporting

If you are satisfied with the way your icon looks, you can either export as an image file such as .PNG, or save it as an icon file (.ico).  Also remember that you don't have to use the recoloring feature, you can simply import your graphic and export it as an icon file.

For more information about IconDeveloper 2.0, and downloads, visit the IconDeveloper page here.

IconDeveloper Screencast

The new Dragon visual style from Stardock Design doesn't just look great, it's fast. For most users, Dragon makes Windows faster than the default look of either Windows XP and especially Windows Vista. On top of that, it has stunning animation on the Start menu at full 30fps. And did we mention it does this without slowing down your PC?  This is what happens when you develop a technology that integrates seamlessly into the native Windows display engine while taking advantage of advances in video drivers (both ATI and nVidia).

Designed by Stardock Design's Mike Bryant and Chaninja, Dragon delivers a complete visual make over to both Windows XP and Windows Vista users that is consistent, reliable, and beautiful.

Dragon on Windows Vista

Dragon on Windows XP

If you don't have WindowBlinds you can get it at http://www.windowblinds.net. You can download Dragon from WinCustomize.com.  Stardock Design also has a page at deviantART. If you have an account there, stop by and say hi!

Just about at the halfway point and we are still going strong.  Yesterday was the 7th Birthday of WinCustomize, and I sometimes wonder how many skins I have downloaded and used over the years.  This week we also saw the release of the DeskScapes 2.0 preview which brings .dreams to all of Vista.

Now for this weeks picks!

	Recyclamation 3 for DesktopX Widgets by JarHead100 This is an animated icon for the recycle bin.  If you are tired of the same old recycle bin, then give this one a try.
	Asteroid in Dreams by CarGuy1 This .dream shows an "orbit" around an asteroid.  Great job.
	Unity for IconPackager by Tiggz There are over 130 icons for both XP and Vista in this icon pack, plus an extra set of icons to go along with it.  It's a very cool design that you definitely need to download.
	Earth Aurora for LogonStudio Vista by teckels A really nice image of an aurora over the Earth.  Very nice.
	Fuliginous for ObjectDock by zakai1369 I really like this set of dock backgrounds.  It goes well with many themes.
	Lightnings in Wallpapers by vlad A little tough to describe this one exactly, but does everything always need a description?  Beautiful work on this on.
	Eye in the Sky in Wallpapers by Richard Mohler Another beautiful landscape from Richard Mohler.  This one gives a nice, relaxing feel to your desktop.
	iLCD for WindowBlinds by OFFICA WoD This WindowBlinds skin has a subtle, Mac-like look to it.  Keep up the great work on this one.
	Luster for WindowBlinds by MikeB314 This week we have another updated skin from MikeB314.  This time the popular "Luster" gets an update.

Show your appreciation to the creators of these fine works, by leaving comments and visiting their personal pages on WinCustomize.  See you next week!