Thanksgiving isn't the most popular skinning holiday, but I wanted to feature a few Thanksgiving themes and wallpapers for those who want a festive desktop this month. The good thing about Thanksgiving is that many of our autumn skins will work perfectly for the holiday, and we have a wide selection of those already.

Check out a few of our favorites!

Thankful

Scenic IV

Happy Thanksgiving Holiday Spread

Two Pumpkins on a Table

We absolutely love Halloween here at Stardock! Frankly, there are a whole bunch of us who will jump at any excuse to dress up in a costume and have fun - Halloween just happens to be the time when everyone else is doing it, too.  

Our operations team here is amazing and they always make sure that we have everything we need to have a good time! They played Monster House on our big TV downstairs and had lunch catered from a local company - everything was absolutely delicious. We all forgot about work for a little bit as we admired each other's costumes, threw a few jokes back and forth, and fueled up on the delicious goody bags filled with sugary sweets that were provided.

We had some pretty fabulous costumes this year and it was so hard to pick our contest winners! But, these four people ended up going home with our coveted trophies:

Most WTF? Costume: Derek as Cousin It
Scariest Costume: Jay as Cosmic Horror Astronaut
Funniest Costume: Cari as a Magical Unicorn
Most Original Costume: Nathan as a Cthulu Investigator

Later that evening, after our work day was done, we held our first ever Stardock Dungeons & Dragons night - which is a whole different blog that you can look for later! In all, I was at the office in costume for somewhere around 13 hours that day, but I don't regret a single second of it. I definitely couldn't wait to get out of my wig, though!

What did you do for Halloween this year? Share some stories and pics with us!

Start11 Brings Customization to the Windows 11 Start Menu Today 
Learn more about Start11 at www.stardock.com 

Stardock released Start11™, a program that allows users to customize the Windows® Start menu and taskbar, today. As with previous editions of StartX products, Start11 allows users to restore the Start menu to appear as it does in previous versions of Windows, as well as customize and enhance its functionality.  

“Since Microsoft first announced Windows 11, we have been working to optimize Start11 for the new operating system” said Brad Wardell, Stardock CEO. “We make it easy for users to customize nearly every detail of their PC experience, including being able to choose from several new Start menu layouts and repositioning the taskbar, among many other things.” 

Start11 is designed for Windows 11 and Windows 10 and comes loaded with features intended to make Windows more personal and productive. Start11 supports moving the Start button to the middle or to the left, adjusting the taskbar size, re-ordering quick access shortcut lists, options for grid spacing, enhanced classic and modern search experiences, restoring the taskbar context menu, and more. Start11 also fully integrates with Stardock’s Fences app. 

For users who want to personalize their Start menu, Start11 offers robust customization options ranging from aesthetic to functional. The software enables enhanced Windows 10 and Windows 11 style Start menus, a compact Windows 7 design, optional Windows 11 style for classic menus, and additional settings that allow you to configure a personalized Start menu. 

The new UI has been designed to support additional Start menu enhancements, extending support to a host of new Start menu ideas like pages, minimalism, and features for enterprise customers. While Start11 does restore previous versions of the Start menu like Start8® and Start10®, it now provides robust options to create a truly personalized experience. 

November is here and we're getting closer and closer to the holiday season! It's not too early to start getting ready for the Christmas season, and I'm going to get to work on mine, and start featuring seasonal skins to for the community to check out. 

But since it's a new month, it's time to share your current desktops so take a screenshot and post to our desktop screenshot thread linked below and let us know what themes you are using this month.

Post your desktops to the monthly thread here: https://forums.wincustomize.com/507959/

(This is a news thread and will be locked. Screenshot taken by JanOscar)

Now that we're almost clear of the Halloween season, the next event to look forward to is Thanksgiving near the end of November. Halloween and Christmas are our two biggest skinning holidays, and Thanksgiving has never really been popular for desktop themes.

Even though I like changing my desktop for the seasons and holidays, I usually just skip ahead and get my Christmas desktop going.

So that's the question this week. Do you add any Thanksgiving themes to your desktop?

I am in a unique and wonderful position here at Stardock in that I genuinely enjoy spending time with my colleagues. Many of us spend time outside of work hours playing board games, slaying monsters in Dungeons & Dragons, or critiquing new and popular films out at the theater together. 

Once in awhile, our amazing operations team plans an outing for us so we can all get out of the office and enjoy some teambuilding activities. Autumn is widely celebrated in Michigan as cider season, and since we are blessed with so many beautiful apple orchards here we're lucky enough to be able to go and enjoy all of the fun that goes along with it.

What does "fun" look like at the apple orchard? It comes in many forms, but in the case of our trip it was a hay ride, a trip through a corn maze, and then roasting marshmallows and eating sugary cider donuts around a toasty bonfire. You can check out a video of our cider mill trip here if you like!

If you're unfamiliar with the concept of a corn maze, it's pretty much just what it sounds like: several paths are made in a corn field at the end of the corn harvesting season and people are turned loose within to find hidden stations. When you reach a station, you punch your card with the associated symbol and then enter it into a drawing for a prize later. 

After the tractor picked us up again, we headed back to our bonfire pit. We had an hour or so to just relax and visit with one another while we roasted marshmallows, drank delicious fresh-pressed cider, and devoured cinnamon-sugar cider donuts - a beloved delicacy here in Michigan!

After we sugared ourselves up, we headed home so that we could start our weekend! The first thing I did when I got back (aside from flurry-cleaning my house before my company arrived) was put some cider in a pot on the stove and heat it up with some mulling spices. It's one of my favorite treats for when the weather starts to turn cold! If you can get your hands on some good apple cider, you should absolutely try this - my recipe is below.

Kristy's Mulling Spice Recipe

• 3-4 cinnamon sticks
• 4 whole nutmeg
• 1/4 cup star anise
• 1/4 cup dried orange peel, coarsely chopped
• 3 tablespoons whole allspice
• 3 tablespoons whole cloves
• 1 tablespoon crystalized ginger, finely chopped (add more ginger for a bit more zip!)

Combine the cinnamon sticks and nutmeg in a plastic bag together. Smash the bag with a rolling pin or meat tenderizer to break them up into smaller pieces.

Combine the contents of the plastic bag with everything else and mix well. Store in an air-tight container. You can also opt to separate the mixture into small cheesecloth pouches or pre-made teabags, but I prefer to just toss it all into the cider loosey-goosey.

To make mulled cider:

Add 1-2 tablespoons of the mix to about 3 or 4 cups of fresh cider and bring to a boil.
Reduce heat and let simmer for about 20 minutes.
Remove from heat and pour into mugs. You can strain out the spices if you prefer, but I usually leave them in.
I also like to add fresh orange slices, cranberries, and/or apple slices if I'm feeling fancy.
Add a splash of bourbon or whiskey if you're of age and feeling spicy! 
These spices also taste absolutely delicious when combined with a bottle of red wine and heated up over the stove.

Are you a cider mill fan? Tell me about what kinds of autumn traditions are alive in your area!

Halloween is this weekend, so there's just a few more days to get your desktop ready for the day! We've been looking at many skins over the past couple of weeks, so I wanted to finish off the Halloween season with a few of our favorites. 

We want to see your Halloween desktops, so be sure to post a screenshot in our October desktop thread.

Bad Jack

Pumpkin

Creepers

Busy Night

Toxic Halloween

I am a lover of soups, stews, and chilis.

The very second the weather dipped below 60 here in Michigan, I popped my head out the door and bellowed "SOUP SEASON!"

...you think I'm exaggerating or being dramatic, but I'm not. My friends (and my poor neighbors) will attest.

Anyway, I'm not the only one who loves this time of year around here! Fall sees all sorts of fun activities popping up at Stardock, from visits to Cider Mills, to Halloween costume contests, and of course also chili cook-offs. We missed out on pretty much all of these things last year, so we're hitting 2021 with a vengeance. 

Last week was our annual chili cook-off, and we brought our best offerings to share with our coworkers and appeal to their better judgments. Some people even teamed up and took to google to find the ultimate recipe for the competition! We had a lot of delicious chilis to taste that day.

Our six competitors were:

• Bacon's The Bomb Chili - Traditional style red chili with ground beef and bacon
• Chili.lua - Dark chocolate chili with stout and beef stew chunks
• Dance Magic Chili - White chicken chili with green chiles, cream, and cumin
• Verde Chicken Chili - Chicken chili with green chiles
• Winning Chili - Traditional red chili
• M-34 Chili - Dark chili made with beer

After vigorous taste testing (and some precarious balancing acts trying to get all the tasting cups back to our seats!), we voted via a QR code that Raeann, our one of our brilliant members of the Operations team, set up for us. A dramatic drumroll or three later, we had our winners!

Debbie's Bacon chili came in at 3rd place, followed by Max and Jacob's dark chocolate chili. Their medal is being beautifully modeled by Scherzer, one of our resident office doggos. My white chicken chili took 1st place, and the trophy is now nestled on my desk next to several other Stardock prizes and mementos I've collected through my years here.

We do cook-offs occasionally here, and it's always fun to see what different tastes and experiences everyone brings with their cooking! Some of us bring tried and true family favorites, while others do some online research, find one that looks good, and gives it a whirl. Every method is valid and delicious - I'm looking forward to whatever our next cook-off is going to be!

Do you have a favorite chili recipe? Have you done cook-offs at work or with friends before? Tell me about it!

Stardock Announces Fences 4 with new features, a Refreshed
Interface and Support for Windows 11
Fences 4 offers an array of customizations to keep PC desktops clean and organized
Get into the alpha now (available exclusively through Object Desktop)

Stardock announced Fences 4, a program that allows users to automatically organize shortcuts and icons on their PC desktops into custom-sized spaces called fences. As with previous editions of the software, Fences 4 creates dedicated areas to organize icons and folders and offers additional customization features that has made it popular with millions of users of Microsoft Windows®. 

"Fences 4 is being designed to meet the needs of today's PC user," said Brad Wardell, CEO of Stardock. "Fences has always been a great way to show a clean desktop or to organize it and now we are adding features that allow users who want a minimalistic desktop to have that while also supporting users who use the desktop as a natural extension of their work space."

Stardock has released an alpha version of Fences 4 for Windows 10 and 11 to users of its Object Desktop suite. New features will be added to it throughout the fall with a targeted release later this winter.

Upcoming features for Fences 4 include virtual desktop support, enhanced search functionality, roaming profiles, and many other updates that will help home and business users stay organized. 

Additionally, Stardock has announced Fences for Business, which will help keep PCs organized and standardized across the workforce. A new kiosk mode will help administrators lock their entire desktop layout, while the Snapshots feature will allow them to replicate layouts across multiple devices. 

The Fences 4 alpha is available exclusively through the Object Desktop™ suite. 
For more information, visit the Fences 4 website here.

Halloween is just a couple of weeks away, and now is the time to get your desktop ready! Today I wanted to feature some of the fantastic, animated wallpapers for DeskScapes that we have on WinCustomize. An animated wallpaper is a fun way to add some customization to your desktop, and Halloween is an especially fun time.

Come check out some of top animated wallpapers for Halloween!

Halloween Eve

Spooky Halloween Forest with Bats

Candle Inside Halloween Pumpkin

Foggy Mistic Forest

Halloween Night