Happy Friday everyone!  This was a great week as we saw the first beta release of the very cool WindowFX 5, which you can get more info about here. I have been having a great time with it on my PC’s and I really like the start menu animations.  Otherwise we had another good week of skins including a new Master skin from Xiandi.

Now for this weeks picks!

The other day I wrote a guide on how to purchase using the in-app functionality, and today I wanted to follow-up with another quick guide on how to activate purchases made.  If you purchased an additional feature for Stardock Tiles, or have Tiles as part of the Object Desktop suite, you might need to activate your existing purchase/features.

Open the Tiles configuration window and navigate down to the ‘Add features” area.  Then click Activate existing purchases button.

Now just enter your Stardock account e-mail and password.

Tiles should recognize it and activate the features available for Tiles.

Tiles 1.0 has been released and is now available for download.  Tiles works by creating a side-bar on a user’s display. At the top of the side-bar are labels for each page such as ‘My Tiles’ or ‘Documents’ or ‘Apps’. Users can then drag and drop programs, documents, or website URLs onto Tiles. When the program is inactive, it appears as an icon. When it is active, it appears as a live preview tile.

Although it’s a free app there is an enhanced version available as well. You can upgrade to additional features or premium skins right inside the Tiles app itself.  This guide will show you how.

Open the Tiles configuration screen by right-clicking and selecting it in Tiles.  Choose the ‘Add features’ section.  Here you can browse through the available features and premium skins. There’s a variety available and you can just purchase the entire bundle for $9.95, or just individual parts.  You can also active existing purchases by entering your Stardock account information.

After you find the features you want and have added them to the cart, you can now begin the checkout process.  You will first be asked to enter your e-mail address.

Next you enter your information and payment method.

Next you’ll see a summary and then you just need to click Purchase to complete the transaction. 

You will now get a confirmation and your new features should be activated and ready to use!

Welcome to the first edition of This Week in Skinning for 2012!  January is usually a bit slow because so many take off for the holidays, but even so we always have skins to feature.

Now for this weeks picks!

If you’ve been looking for a program to replace Windows Media Center which performs all its functions and is highly customizable, you’ve got to take a look at Media Portal.

It has Main areas: My Music, My Videos, My Pictures and my Weather. It’ll play all the file types WMC does, and do it your way via slews of plug-ins. You can create your own playlists and

• Watch Live TV or schedule and record
• Play videos, movies and DVDs
• Browse EPG and upcoming programs
• Listen to music and radio
• Stream media, radio, TV to any connected HTPC/PC connected to your network
• View pictures or create slideshows
• Browse all your movies
• Check weather, news, or information on the web and even play games

And, you can make it look the way you want with many different skins to choose from and tutorial videos. There are widescreen and non-wide galleries. You even skin the weather app.

Check out the skins here: http://www.team-mediaportal.com/extensions/widescreen

Anyway, I figured folks here would want to see it:

These are all different skins. You really should take a look at their gallery. It’s easy to navigate.

Hey! Have a happy Sunday!

Source:

http://www.team-mediaportal.com/

http://www.thewindowsclub.com/media-portal-open-source-windows-media-center-replacement

Oh my, we have halfway through December and Christmas is just right around the corner.  We are also wrapping up our 2011 Holiday skinning contest, and so far we have received a nice variety of skins. 

Now for this weeks picks!

I wanted to give everyone a reminder that the WC Holiday contest ends next week, so be sure to get your submissions in before then.  If you need more info, head over to the contest forum thread.  As we get towards the end of the year, I’d like to hear about your favorite skins from the past year and what you’d like to see in 2012.

Now for this weeks picks!

Now that Tiles is available, I wanted to start showing off some of the features that makes Tiles pretty awesome.  First, we’ll start off with Pages as this is an important configuration and has a significant impact on how you interact with Tiles.

Remember, if you don’t have Tiles, get the info here: https://www.stardock.com/products/tiles/

Adding and Removing Pages

In your Tiles configuration the first option is Pages which is going to let you customize the pages in Tiles, and assign them different properties if you so desire.  When you start Tiles you are already presented with some default pages like Web, but of course you might want to keep them all, or delete them all and start from scratch.  Regardless of what you want to do, it’s easy to add and remove Pages.

In the upper right-hand you have a button labeled Add.  Just click that and enter the name for the page you want and it’s ready to use or setup further.  To remove a page just click the one you want to delete and click the X next to it.

Configuring Pages

Select a page from the list and click the pencil icon to enter the configuration page for it.  Here you can select which windows should show on the page.  You can select to only show windows from applications you select from, or to show all windows with exceptions that you can also choose.

I’m using this page as a document-only page, so for something like this I would only want to show windows from document apps I use such as Microsoft Word, Excel, etc.  You can either select an app by selecting it in explorer, or you can select from applications you have running.  You can further fine tune windows that show based on their state or applications that have recently run.

As you can see in the screenshot, I have my Documents Page with Word and Excel showing.  Now I can have a virtual desktop of my document windows that can be minimized and maximized when scrolling through pages as you can see in this quick demo video.

This has been an exciting and busy week!  We have the public beta of Tiles out now, and of course we can’t forget the WC Holiday contest going on.  This opens up lots of opportunities for skinners as we expect a big increase in usage of Tiles and for people looking to use different skins.  Now would be a good time to learn how to skin it.

Now for this weeks picks!

I’m sure you saw the news of DeskScapes 3.5 and the four new Dynamic animated wallpapers that were released not too long ago.  These four .dreams are pretty awesome, and they have been very popular since release.  However, I wanted to point out that these .dreams have settings that let you adjust various parts of the .dreams for some customization of how they look.

For instance, for the Moving Wallpaper .dream just click the Dynamic Dream Setting tab in DeskScapes and you have a small window come up with several options for this .dream.  Moving Wallpapers is a .dream that takes your wallpapers and applies cool zoom and pan effects on your desktop.  In the settings you can change the speed of the picture change, load different images per monitor, control pan/zoom settings, and add/remove directories for the pictures.

Other .dreams like Colored Lights has similar settings.  For these .dreams you can prevent certain colors from appearing, change the speed of the effects, and control content on all your monitors.

You can find these new premium .dreams in the WinCustomize gallery, and make sure you grab a copy of DeskScapes!

More info: https://www.stardock.com/products/deskscapes/