The Thanksgiving holiday is just less than a week away, but unfortunately I didn't come across too many Thanksgiving inspired skins.  That won't be a problem because I have a feeling this Christmas and winter season will be fantastic for skinning.  Speaking of which, next week I will begin making calls for seasonal skins and help once again with this years Holiday Skin Guide.

The WinCustomize Charity/Subscription Drive is still going on, and aside from the subscriptions, several Master Skinners are also participating with many great skins, so be sure to check it out.  If you would like to help spread the word about the drive, I wrote an article explaining how you can put banners on your websites and blogs to help.

Now for this weeks picks!

Curvy for CursorXP By Richard Mohler This is a new favorite of mine.  Richard has created a gorgeous cursor that I have used with several skins and it goes well with many.  Great job.

 

RC Radio in DesktopX Widgets By buzzh58 Buzzh58 created this to fit perfectly inside a RightClick menu, but it works just as well stand-alone.

 

Good Night Earth in Dreams By TheMasterBaron This new Master Skin is one of the highest quality .dreams I have seen in a while.  Very nice.

 

Footure for IconPackager By mrSkope There has been a lack of IP themes lately, but when one comes along it sure is a good one.  This pack comes with over 120 icons for Vista and XP, although there are no Live Folders yet.

 

Turbo Tabbed & Side Docks for ObjectDock By WebGizmos WebGizmos has once again created an awesome set of dock backgrounds for the Turbo WindowBlinds from Stardock Design.  Nice work.

 

Opaloid in Wallpapers By radnor27 This reminds of an image of a nebula, but whatever it was designed to be it's beautiful.  A widescreen version is also available.

 

WhiteFire2 for WindowBlinds By basj WhiteFire is definitely "hot" with a wonderful use of design and colors.  There are quite a few matching skins including cursors, widgets, logons, etc.  Be sure to download this one.

 

Another great week, and I want to start hearing from people who plan on creating some holiday inspired skins.  Whatever you are working on always feel free to stop by the "What are you working on" thread and give us a peek at what you are working on.  See you next week!

 

Over the past week or so, you have heard plenty of talk about the WinCustomize Charity/Subscription Drive we have going.  The drive got off to a great start, but we are starting to see a slowdown and if this continues it will be difficult to make our goal.  So what can we as community members do to help, well it's pretty easy and I wanted to share some ways that I have been doing personally to help spread the word.

Personal Blog/Website

Many of us, including myself, have their own personal blogs or website.  There are a wide variety of free blog services out there, and many people have their own hosting.   One of the most popular blogging platforms that people use with their hosts is WordPress.  We made some banners for users to put on their sites as a way to help, and I wanted to demonstrate how to get these on your sites. 

WordPress:  In the Widgets section, which should be found under Presentation you can add all types of things to your sidebar from here.  Just drag a text widget to your sidebar, add some html code, and save.

WordPress Widgets

This is the code you should use for this banner: 

<a href="https://www.wincustomize.com/charity.aspx?cpRef=theislanddog.com"> <img border=0 src="//images.stardock.com/zoomba/charity/ChildsPlay_125x125.jpg"</a>

Remember to change the referral url to yours, so we can see who is sending people our way.  Just replace "theislanddog.com" with your site url.  This is how the banner should look in your sidebar.

Finished WordPress sidebar widget

The same code can also be placed in any webpage by pasting the html code where you want the banner to go.  We have three sizes of banners, you just need to replace the image url with the banner you want to use.  You can see the banners here. 

• https://www.wincustomize.com/articles.aspx?aid=167021

Some other uses using this type of code would be placing a banner on your MySpace profile.  Check my MySpace profile for an example of this.

 

E-Mail Signatures

I know many of your are like me, who send and receive a vast amount of e-mails everyday.  Zubaz tipped me off to an idea of placing a banner in your e-mail signature to whenever you send mail the banner will be included at the bottom of your message.  I use Outlook 2007, and all you need to do is create a new signature with one of the images, link the referral url and you are all set.

Zubaz wrote an article detailing how to do this with Gmail, and many other mail services offer signatures so check with your e-mail provider or e-mail client.

 

Word of Mouth

One of the best ways to spread the word about anything is the traditional "word of mouth".  Let your family and friends know about WinCustomize, and the benefits of becoming a subscriber along which in turn helps out a great cause.

I have sent the link to many of my friends who never even heard of WinCustomize, but are now hooked.  WinCustomize is one of the best communities out there and it's growing day by day, but giving a friend a nudge in this direction is always a good idea.

 

Your Ideas

If you have any tips or ideas on how to help spread the word about the Charity/Subscription Drive, then please feel free to list them here.  I will write a follow-up article if we get some good tips coming in.  If you have also posted links or banners on your blogs, sites, social networks, etc., then also leave the links here so we can check them out.  I would love to see how our community members are helping to spread the word.

 

The month is moving right along I see, once again Friday has snuck up on us.  It's been quite a busy week at WinCustomize and there is much more coming.  The WinCustomize Charity/Subscription drive started off with a nice bang, but it's starting to slow up, so be sure to pass the word along.  We had some banners made up with a few different sizes so you can place them on your website, blog, Myspace page, etc.

Next, we have the first chapter posted of the "official" SkinStudio 6 tutorial.  Although the guide is for anyone, it will be especially useful for people who are new to skinning and want to try their hand at creating a skin.  The remaining chapters are being written, so keep your eye out for updates.

Now for this weeks picks!

Harmony DX 2 in DesktopX Themes By PuterDudeJim PuterDudeJim has based this DX theme off of the popular WindowBlinds skin "Harmony".  This launchbar type skin is a perfect accompaniment.

 

The Artifact  in Dreams By TheMasterBaron This .dream is of a flyby of an alien "artifact" in an artic land.  Nice work.

 

WhiteFire2 Dock Backgrounds  for ObjectDock By messiah1 These dock backgrounds are made to match the WhiteFire2 WindowBlinds skin by basj.  Great job.

 

Portal for SoundPackager By Unserene This sound pack includes sounds from the popular "Portal" game.  Some of the sounds are a bit too long, but it's one to check out.

 

Eye of the Storm  in Wallpapers By Richard Mohler Richard keeps putting out the wallpapers lately, and this is another that you need to download.

 

Don't forget later today to check out the first episode of WinCustomize Live where your gracious host Zoomba will discuss the WinCustomize Charity/Subscription Drive and take your questions.  Great week by all the artists this week and I'm looking forward to the holiday skins.  See you next week!

 

Hi all!

Those of you who have a MySpace account, post here if you'd like and maybe we can add some friends to our networks.

My account is www.myspace.com/draginol

What's yours?

I can't believe it's November already, and the holiday season is rapidly approaching.  I have to say I was very impressed at the amount of submissions we received for Halloween.  This years Halloween Skin Guide was huge, and thanks to everyone who took the time to create a Halloween inspired skin.  Now enough of Halloween, because we have some bigger holidays coming up.

The Christmas and Winter seasons have always been big here at WinCustomize.  We already have a real nice selection of skins, but I want to make this year the best so far.  I'd especially like to see some holiday themed .dreams, sidebar gadgets, widgets, and wallpapers.  What type of holiday skins would you like to see?

Now for this weeks picks!

Next of Skin for CursorXP By J. Aroche This cursor is part of the "Next of Skin" community project.  This is just a phenomenal cursor, so take my word for it and download it.

 

Comet II Deep Impact in Dreams By xstudio This .dream has a slowly moving comet moving through the sky with a beautiful lake background.  Very nice.

 

Carbon-ite for IconPackager By Z71 This icon pack features over 60 icons, made for both Windows XP and Vista.  There is also a matching WindowBlinds skin, so be sure to check Z71's personal page for more.

 

Liffy Falls for LogonStudio Vista By mrs starkers Mrs starkers once again brings us a beautiful image for us to see when we logon into Vista.  Great work.

 

Sea wonderland in Wallpapers By webby85 Simply beautiful wallpaper from webby85, but I would like to see some more resolutions with these.

 

Brio XP for WindowBlinds By Night Train Night Train is back again to share another great WindowBlinds skin.  It contains 4 styles and works great with recoloring.

 

Harmony for XP and Vista for WindowBlinds By vStyler This new Master Skin from vStyler has both Windows XP and Vista versions.  The XP version contains 4 color presets, and there are several matching skins available as well. Harmony is also one of the Master Skins participating in this years WinCustomize Charity Drive.  You can find more information about that here.

November is already taking off and it looks like it's going to be a great month.  Don't forget the WinCustomize Charity/Subscription Drive that we just kicked off, and be sure to tell your friends and family.  See you next week!

 

A new month is here, and that always brings us another edition of This Month in Dreams.  This is the monthly feature of some of the most popular .dreams (animated wallpapers) that are submitted to WinCustomize.  Users of Windows Vista Ultimate  who have downloaded Stardock DeskScapes can download these wallpapers to add a bit of "motion" to their desktop.

Now for this months .dreams!

Video: Animated Wallpapers - October '07 Edition 

The .dreams featured in the video can be found at the links below.

• Rest in Peace by Stardock Design
• red_clouds by muckyman
• Poubel Sun v1.0 by brenopoubel
• Comet II Deep Impact by xstudio
• midnight_moon by muckyman
• Poubel Island v1.0 by brenopoubel

 

The end of the month is just around the corner, and obviously the "theme" for this month has been Halloween.  This years Halloween Skin Guide was huge and I was very pleased to see the amount of Halloween inspired skins submitted this year. 

I would say the next best holiday for skinning would be Christmas.  I'm already working on a few holidays skins, and I hope to make this holiday season the best so far for WinCustomize.  So as usual keep us updated in the "What are you working on" thread.

Now for this weeks picks!

Love's Dying Embers for CursorXP By BoXXi Here is a cursor set to go along with the matching WindowBlinds skin.  There is a beautiful use of color here, and this is one to definitely check out.

 

Creepy Critters for CursorXP By Drill'n Boss Well it's not Halloween yet, so here is another addition to the cursor lineup.  Great work.

 

Slider cpu-mem widget in DesktopX Widgets By I.R. Brainiac This CPU/memory widget is made to match I.R.'s WindowBlinds skin.  This is another very creative and well designed widget.  Great job.

 

Ghost Time in DesktopX Widgets By adni18 When you have this clock on your desktop, be sure to "throw" it around a bit and see this cool effect in action.

 

midnight_moon in Dreams By muckyman This is a beautiful moonilight scene over some smoothly animated water.  Be sure to download this one.

 

Rock for SoundPackager By Stardock Design This new sound package from Stardock Design gives your PC some "rocking" sounds.  Give it a shot and let us know what you think.

 

Hallow Inn in Wallpapers By tippytoenail Another Halloween wallpaper to go with your "spooky" desktops this month.  Great job.

 

Autumn Colors v1.0 for WindowBlinds By unclerob Here is another creative and colorful skin for the new season upon us.  Very nice work.

Well this was a busy week, so a couple more features than usual seemed necessary.  Be sure to check the galleries at WinCustomize for more awesome submissions.  See you week!

 

In many ways, The Magic Desktop represents a real triumph for the WindowBlinds / Object Desktop community.  The Magic suite is the ultimate "I told you so" moment for long time skinners and users of skins who supported Stardock and WindowBlinds.

Let me explain what I mean by that:

Since 2001, users of WindowBlinds (and its big brother, Object Desktop) have taken a bit of a beating from people who advocated merely patching parts of Windows in order to run unsigned msstyles.  Sure, msstyles were relatively crippled but they were "good enough" for many people and most importantly, they were free.  By contrast, WindowBlinds and its parent suite, Object Desktop are most definitely not free.  The argument, therefore, given by patcher advocates was that the WindowBlinds community were a bunch of suckers "paying for what should be free".

WindowBlinds advocates, argued back pointing out the reliability and performance advantages of WindowBlinds as well as the additional features.  But those arguments mattered little to people who simply saw a thing that was free and another thing that wasn't. 

But then a WindowBlinds advocate made a prediction on a website that I won't mention here: "If you're interested in having control over how your PC looks, you better hope that WindowBlinds succeeds. Because Microsoft has a long history of sticking their toe into a community and killing it off forever."  This being a reference to Microsoft's previous endeavors like Active Desktop (which killed Pointcast), basic grammar controls in Word that wiped out stand-alone grammer checkers, disk compression, sound themes, and so forth.

The argument boiled down to this: What if "Longhorn" didn't have Msstyles like Windows XP does? And what if there were no WindowBlinds there to give users the option to change it?

The response at the time was that "Visual styles" were here to stay and if anything, Microsoft would expand the customization options on "Longhorn". 

And so Longhorn arrived in the form of Windows Vista and sure enough, the MSStyles on Vista are nothing like they are on XP.  If msstyles were limited on XP, they're absolutely crippled on Vista.

Thankfully, thanks to the WindowBlinds community's perseverance, Windows Vista users still can customize the look and feel of Windows Vista and Windows XP and do so with the same skins.

Let me show you some of the nice touches of The Magic Desktop that WindowBlinds users can take for granted but are a pipe dream for those still trying to patch the OS.

The Start Menu

[See Animation]
WindowBlinds 6 lets users have nicely animated start menus that use virtually no CPU (video card acceleration instead). When done right, like it is in Magic, the result is a clean, polished experience.

Explorer

Windows XP users are long used to being able to customize the look and feel of Explorer. The Magic Desktop does this very well on Windows XP.  But for Windows Vista users, this is a new thing.  The Magic Desktop is a pretty radical theme in the sense that it is designed partially to show off what is possible. It's not just "Look at me, it's Windows Vista with a few bitmap resources changed" but instead is a full-blown skin.

Internet Explorer 7

Changing the IE 7 controls in Vista via an msstyles is a pipe dream because on Vista, these controls are hard-coded. WindowBlinds actually has to do special work in order to skin the Windows Vista IE7 tabs and other controls.

Other interesting controls

The Windows Sidebar is also skinned via WindowBlinds 6.

And if I had Office 2007 installed on this machine, I could show how it even skins the new Office 200-style title bars natively.

Let's not forget IconPackager

What do you notice about the folders in the above screenshot? Look closely.  They are still live folders.  IconPackager (also part of Object Desktop) was updated to support a new icon package format that supports changing these live folder icons.  Without such a change, icon changing on Windows Vista would have been largely pointless because what good are changing some icons but not changing folders? It would look very inconsistent.

The Magic Desktop suite not only supports this new feature, but all of its icons support 256x256 resolution.

How big is a 256x256 icon in its native size?

256x256 icon, native size.

In other words, The Magic Suite's icons are effectively clip art too. When you get to be that big, the detail and quality requirements become crucial to the experience.

Hooray for Object Desktop users!

Object Desktop users get a discount on The Magic Desktop suite (and we even had a special promotion for Object Desktop users who re-subscribed into 2009 to emphasize how important Object Desktop users are to Windows customization).

Someone might argue "Well, if Object Desktop, WindowBlinds, and IconPackager didn't exist, someone would have done it."  Perhaps.  But we're coming up on the first year anniversary of Windows Vista and Object Desktop and its programs IconPackager and WindowBlinds remain the only choice at any price for users who want to do this kind of thing. 

People have taken changing things like their icons for granted since before Windows 3.0.  Yet, here we are in 2007 and there's no way to change a live folder built into Windows and look right.  Try it.  Thanks to Object Desktop users, Windows customization has continued to thrive and in a Windows Vista world, where customization is more difficult, users still have a choice in what their Windows experience looks like.

Visit: Magic Desktop Homepage

Halloween is always a great time of the year for skinning as there is so many creative submissions that have to do with Halloween.  One of my favorite premium suites has been the R.I.P. suite that was available to WinCustomize subscribers.  It has been updated this year for both Vista and WindowBlinds 6, and includes a new wallpaper and weather gadget.

The suite includes:

• WB6 Animated skin for Vista & XP
• Icon Package for Vista & XP
• Wallpaper in 3 Resolutions
• Clock Gadget Calendar Gadget
• Weather Gadget

*Note:  You must have the latest version of Theme Manager from Stardock Central to use this suite.

You can apply the suite by using Theme Manager, which allows you to select the different options for the suite, such as the wallpaper resolution.  Load the .suite file, click apply and select your options, then click "Yes" to apply the suite.

The WindowBlinds skin, which is compatible with Windows Vista and XP, has been updated with a ghoulish start menu animation.  I find myself hitting the start button just to see it when I'm working. 

The icon set for IconPackager is a perfect match, and it has also been updated for Windows Vista.  There new wallpaper comes in 3 resolutions, and is worth the download just for that.  If you have Vista Ultimate, be sure to download the Rest in Peace .dream for DeskScapes.

 

Also included with the suite are some gadgets, which are mini-applications for your desktop.  There is an expandable calendar gadget, a clock gadget, and an expandable weather gadget, all which matches beautifully with the WindowBlinds skin.

You can get the R.I.P. 2007 suite by becoming a WinCustomize subscriber, or if you purchase any premium suite before October 31st, 2007, you will get it free!

 

You have probably been seeing some news about the release of the WinCustomize Toolbar for your internet browser.  So as usual when something new like this comes up for WinCustomize, I thought many of you would enjoy a quick tour of some of the features this toolbar offers.

I guess the most obviously place to start is getting this installed so you can use it.  You can download the toolbar from https://www.wincustomize.communitytoolbars.com/ and it's available free for Firefox or IE.  It's safe to use and does not contain any spyware or malware.

It's pretty customizable, but for this tour I'm going to show the toolbar as its default configuration.  Clicking the WinCustomize button arrow will give you a drop-down menu which gives you access to various commands including the toolbar options.  Clicking the WinCustomize button itself takes you straight to the WC homepage.

The next feature on the toolbar is the search box.  The default search is powered by Google, but selecting the drop-down arrow will give you options to search through WinCustomize, a dictionary, eBay, images, etc.  The next button is Software, which when clicked takes you to the websites of applications such as WindowBlinds, IconPackager, etc.

The button next to that is Galleries, and is one of my favorite features of the toolbar.  I often need to quickly access the WinCustomize galleries to get a link, and using the toolbar I can get there with less clicks.  When you click this button you get a list of the most popular galleries on WinCustomize like the wallpaper gallery, and when clicked it takes you directly to that gallery.

Next up is the news button where we can broadcast news or events direct to users of the WinCustomize Toolbar, and when you click the message you will be taken directly to the message page.

Now we get to the Community button where it gives links to other community sites such as Skinning.net and Winmatrix.com.  Next to that we have the RSS feed which shows the feeds from several popular tech sites. Then there is a weather feature which shows your local forecast, and can be expanded by clicking.

Getting down to the last couple of sections now, and the next being the radio station gadget.  This lets you listen to your favorite radio stations through the toolbar.  There are several default stations, and it allows you to search and add your own.  The last feature in the default toolbar is the e-mail checker.  This works with several popular e-mail providers such as Hotmail and Gmail and can notify you when you receive new e-mail, and can take you right to your web based e-mail account.  It's a very handy feature.

The WinCustomize Toolbar also supports gadgets, which you can find access to in the options menu.  There are many to choose from and you can customize the toolbar to fit your needs.  This covers the basic features and functions of the toolbar, but feel free to explore and let me know of any other features you find useful and interesting.

Download the toolbar now!