The wallpaper gallery here on WinCustomize is one of the most searched areas of the site. It's content though can sometimes be lacking when searching for a specific thing, or just the fact not a lot of people upload to that gallery anymore.

Well, we're working on changing that! We have a dedicated account that will be bringing new wallpaper content to the site. It's already started and you might have noticed a bunch of new wallpapers already. We'll try to bring a wide variety of styles, but if you think there's a specific type or category needed, please let us know.

We'll be expending this to add additional animated wallpapers to our DeskScapes gallery as well!

For now, check out some of the new wallpapers in the gallery here.

https://www.wincustomize.com/explore/wallpapers

I know there’s an overall stereotype about gamers being solitary and reclusive by nature, and while it’s not altogether untrue, there are definitely outliers. I’m one of them, and the coming weeks of isolation are looming over my head like an ominous shadow - dramatic, sure, but that’s not exactly off brand for me.

I am an extremely social person. I host dinners and game nights regularly, I go to the gym (albeit not nearly as often as I’d like to), I visit with friends and family and love going to social events. The recent mandates meant to help contain the spread of COVID-19 are a necessary inconvenience that I am more than willing to bear in order to keep my loved ones safe. Am I happy about it? Oh, heck no, but who is?

These may not apply so much to me, but I laughed.

Memes aside, if there was ever a time when isolation was completely manageable for me, now is it. The Internet has been an incredible tool that I’ve been lucky to grow up with, and while it certainly has its dark sides, I have been fortunate enough to use it to cultivate and maintain friendships with people from all over the world. 

As I’ve mentioned before in other blogs, I am an avid board gamer. The thing about board games is that they typically require other people to play with (although there are several games with solo variants!). It makes me a little sad not to have my basement game room filled with people and laughter, but it’ll pass before long - in the meantime, I’ve moved my board gaming online.

There are so many options for board gaming online now, it’s really exciting. I can play some of my favorite games with some of my favorite people, some of whom don’t live close to me and can’t exactly pop over for a game night during non-pandemic times. Some board games have their own specific apps, complete with music, sound effects, and visual effects that fit the overall theme. Tabletop Simulator, however, is a basic program that is powered almost entirely by user-created mods.

While I certainly prefer face-to-face interactions, this really is the next best thing. I have a group of friends who I spend most of my time with online (since they live in places like San Francisco, Vancouver, Florida, London, etc.) and we use Discord to chat while we play things or stream Netflix or Disney+ together. Yesterday, I fired up Tabletop Simulator and a few of them joined me for a game of (sorrynotsorry) Pandemic.

We were ill-prepared for how quickly the disease spread this game.

If you’re unfamiliar  with the game Pandemic, it is a co-operative player experience wherein you’re all working together playing various roles (Medic, Scientist, Quarantine Specialist, etc.) to contain and halt the spread of 4 deadly viruses. Everyone plays against the board, and while the early game may lure you into a false sense of security, don’t be fooled - chaos comes, and it comes fast.

We usually play on the highest difficulty level and use the “On the Brink” expansion because we enjoy the challenge. We introduced a few new people to the game yesterday, who thoroughly enjoyed themselves, even though we ran the player deck out and lost at the last minute (ouch!). It just meant that we were all fired up to come back for a rematch against the dastardly board.

If nothing else, you can have fun doodling ridiculous cat faces before, after, or during your game!

There are thousands and thousands of mods to download for various games, as well as some premium content for more popular games like Wingspan. If you’re looking to connect with friends while you’re in self-isolation, online multiplayer games are a great way to do that, whether they’re board games on Tabletop Simulator or multiplayer video games like The Political Machine or Offworld Trading Company.

How are you combating boredom and staying connected with people?

We always posts screenshots of our desktops, but lets take it a bit further and post images of your desktop setups!

CursorFX 4 was announced last week, and I wanted to go through the cursor theme gallery on WinCustomize and find some of the popular themes that might be fun to check out.

If you happen to be looking for some of the legacy cursor themes that used to be included with CursorFX, then you'll be happy to know we uploaded them to WinCustomize. You can find them here: https://www.wincustomize.com/explore/cursorfx

Black Fire by vampothika

Piranha FX by neone6

Trident by theAVMAN

neovision by jester382

Sharingan Cursor by Hakudos

This spring, Windows10 v. 2004 or 2020 first half year update (code named 20H1) will be coming and it's feature heavy, with some meaningful changes such as those in Cortana  and notepad, Windows subsystem for Linux (WSL 2), Windows explorer with much better local search and tied to OneDrive, sandbox and virtual desktops, and a beefed up Task manager.

There are more, and I suggest reading up on them in the link above.

And have a good weekend! 😉

Ah, Kickstarter: the land of hopes, dreams, and thousands of people with cash to burn. In its earliest days, Kickstarter was a platform that provided creators with a venue for funding projects they otherwise would never be able to do on their own (and for some, couldn’t do even with successful funding).  

Nowadays, Kickstarter is still an effective way for indie developers and other small creators to get their projects funded and out in the public eye, but it’s evolved into something more beyond that. Kickstarter has become an effective and impressive marketing tool for well-established companies in electronic and board gaming industries, among others. 

I’ve had the discussion with several different people, all with varying opinions on the matter. Should Kickstarter really be used as a marketing method, or should it be reserved for those small creators who actually need it in order to break into the market? Everyone’s thoughts are pretty mixed, but I’m not likely to believe that Kickstarter will ever bar any legitimate project from launching a campaign - after all, the more profitable the project, the more money Kickstarter makes.

I recently came across an article on The Verge that talked about the marketing strategy behind (at the time) an up and coming Kickstarter from Spinmaster and Cool Mini or Not (CMON), two very established companies in the board game world. CMON is well known for its Kickstarter campaigns and the sort of hype they create, and when they launched Marvel United last month, I decided I’d hop on for the ride. The way they ran their campaign was brilliant, and I’m going to break down what I think made it a successful project in next week’s blog.

I personally have been fortunate enough not to have been burned by a Kickstarter yet. There are certainly records of failed projects, but on the whole most projects are backed in good faith, funded, and rewards are distributed as promised. In fact, a study shows that only 9% of successfully funded Kickstarters fail to deliver to their backers.

Honestly, I think one of the reasons I’ve avoided the sting of money wasted is that I tend to only back projects from companies that I’m familiar with. Board game publishers like CMON, Smirk and Dagger, Slugfest, Calliope Games, and so on, have an established customer base and don’t really need the funds from a Kickstarter to get their games started - they’re just using it to generate hype and gain early adopters by using Kickstarter exclusive rewards.

While a brilliant marketing move, many would argue that this goes against the spirit of what Kickstarter meant to do in the first place: give a platform to smaller creators for funding their projects. But, does the existence of these bigger names on Kickstarter really take away from indie creators?

In order to be effective on Kickstarter in the first place, creators need to have a decent seat in the PR arena. Whether big companies are also campaigning on Kickstarter or not is irrelevant if no one even knows about your project to begin with. You could argue - perhaps rightfully - that the existence of these other projects pushes smaller projects out of the range of discoverability, but that’s not really true, either. Thousands of projects, indie or not, still crowd out the market.

Sometimes, I discover a project on Kickstarter and feel compelled to back it. More often than not, however, I hear about a project elsewhere on social media or through word of mouth, and that’s what drives me there to check it out. If you’re not able to put the time and effort into PR, then Kickstarter won’t be an effective platform for you anyway.

This blog post from Stonemaier Games has an excellent breakdown of a pro and con argument for big companies using Kickstarter as a platform. As it stands, I definitely see both sides from a consumer and a marketer’s point of view. 

What projects have you backed on Kickstarter? What do you think about how the platform has evolved over the years?

We've been working on WinCustomize.com to get some added features to make the site more usable, and one of those is tags in the upload screen. Keywords aren't exactly new here, but we've been working on the functionality of them and now they will really improve the search process on the site. For example, put 4K in the search box. You will now get a much better search result than before. 

This is still a work in progress, but we wanted to let our skinners know that this is something to pay attention to now when uploading and updating skins. If you currently have skins on the site, you can also update them to include new tags and we encourage skinners to do so. 

There's still much more to do and I'll be sure to keep you updated on the process. Also a big thanks to Pat for his hard work on the site, and if you have any related suggestions about tags please leave a comment.

March is already here and I wanted to give a wrap-up of what was happening on WinCustomize during the month of February. 

Stardock News:

SoundPackager 10 released!

"SoundPackager 10 adds cloud access to thousands of different sounds, along with a number of all-new sound packages designed to give Windows users additional choices in how their PC sounds. Users can also create their own sound packages to share with others via an in-app editor."

New and Updated Master skins:

Jargon by basj

Win Retro by don5318

Tidal by LightStar

Capri by LightStar

Tech news of interest:

Microsoft is killing off music, smart home, and third-party skills in Cortana

Everything we know about Xbox Series X: Launch titles, specs, design, price, and more

Microsoft to combine its Windows client and hardware teams under Chief Product Officer Panos Panay

Hey! March already!

Post 'em if you have them!

Looking forward to the great desktops and new skins!

Ghacks is an excellent tech website. It was recently sold, however, the tech content has remained in Martin Brinkmann's extremely capable hands. 

So, I was perusing there, as I really didn't want to do an article about MS killing the useless Live Tiles in W10, because Start10 beats anything MS has offered with W8 onward, nor about new icons coming to W10 as I think the icons created here beat them hands down, and always have.

So, Brinkmann discusses the findings of this study, which looked at:

"Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Brave Browser, Microsoft Edge and Yandex Browser...to assess the privacy risks associated with this backend data exchange during general web browsing. Questions we try to answer include: (i) Does this data allow servers to track the IP address of a browser instance over time (rough location can be deduced from an IP address, so IP address tracking is potentially a surrogate for location tracking) and (ii) Does the browser leak details of the web pages visited."

The bottom line result is that out of the box, using default settings (like no autofill), Brave won among them all. In Brinkmann's closing words:

"The researcher analyzed the default state of the browsers and found that Brave had the most privacy friendly settings. At least some of the browsers may be configured to improve privacy by changing the default configuration, e.g. disabling autocomplete functionality."

But, the study left a bit to be desired, at least for me. Vivaldi, Epic browser and (shhh) Tor weren't in this study, and imho, certainly Tor should have been. Interestingly, Bravo has the ability to apply Tor extension to private browsing ("Private Window with Tor: Tor hides your IP address from the sites you visit").

When Tor is put head to head with Bravo, take a look at the results (pros and cons) from users at Slant. It's not the only site which issued a comparison. Truth be told, though, Tor is slower than molasses in January, because of how it's onion layered switching works.

Without starting a browser war or a "mine is better" contest, I'd really like to hear what you all think.

Sources and links:

https://www.ghacks.net/2020/02/25/study-finds-brave-to-be-the-most-private-browser/

https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/pubs/browser_privacy.pdf

https://www.guidingtech.com/brave-browser-vs-tor-secure-private-comparison/