At long last it is the weekend and as usual we end it with a roundup of the hottest skins and themes submitted to WinCustomize.com. 

Now for this weeks picks!

Hey everyone!  So much going on behind the scenes that it is getting crazy again.  Along with the actual skins themselves, we have had some interesting posts on WC along with great community involvement.  Check out the Object Desktop: Status Report 2011 here!

Now for this weeks picks!

Greetings! Long time no see!

So what’s going on with Object Desktop these days?  The answer: A lot. Much of what we’ve worked on for the past year hasn’t gotten communicated very well to our consumers and I apologize for that. 

As some of you may know, we sold Impulse to Gamestop last year.  A lot of people couldn’t believe that we would sell our most profitable business unit. But I suspect some of you will understand why.  It was consuming us.  In another year, Stardock would have been Impulse and little else.  And if money were the only purpose in life, maybe that would be a good thing.  But Stardockians want to make cool stuff, not put all our time into selling other people’s stuff no matter how cool it is.

This past year

That isn’t to say we haven’t been able to release some really cool stuff in the past couple of years.  Fences was recently regarded as the “best. program. ever.” by CNET. WindowFX 4, DeskScapes 3 upped the ante and while not part of Object Desktop, ObjectDock 2 came out this past year. And there have been updates to WindowBlinds, SkinStudio, IconPackager and Theme Manager in recent times to keep building on their success.

The cost of compatibility

At this stage in the development of desktop enhancements, we have to make some tough choices.  The #1 slow down to our development cycles has been trying to get things to run on Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Vista 64, Windows 7, and Windows 7 64.  And we are already developing for Windows 8 as well which is, in itself, a pretty significant departure.

So on the one hand, customers want new stuff and lots of updates but on the other hand they want their OS supported and we just don’t have the manpower to do that.  Back in the Windows XP days, we could crank out a ton of cool stuff.  Now, we have to worry about whether certain system DLLs will be available on Windows 7 “Ultimate” vs. Windows 7 “Home” or whether they were taken out entirely after Windows Vista Business.  Desktop Enhancements: Fun times.

Of course, in the old days, I was around to keep everyone in the loop on this stuff. For a lot of our long-time customers, it’s not the slow down in new programs but the lack of communication. Hence, the hidden cost of the focus on Impulse for the last couple of years.

Where we are now

So let’s talk about what’s happening NOW

Tiles

Our most radical new program is called Tiles. There’s an early beta of it on Object Desktop right now. It’s designed to enable users to manage their tasks in “pages” of tiles that represent what they’re currently working on or will be working on.

In the old days, we made virtual desktops. That made sense when we were all running on individual, low resolution monitors.  But today and into the future, high resolution, multiple monitor setups are how power users work and what they need are things that let them make full use of that.  That is the purpose of Tiles.

Carousel

In a similar vein, we’re working on a new program that will let you more effectively switch between running tasks via your keyboard.  Microsoft and Apple have each tried their hand with this but we have felt they spent too much effort in making it demo well versus being a practical tool.  And let’s face it, Alt-Tab is starting to get pretty long in the tooth.

WindowFX 5

WindowFX 4 was a significant departure from the old “special effects” concept of WindowFX.  That was because on Windows Vista, all those cool DWM effects were not hardware accelerated (Microsoft wasn’t hardware accelerating a lot of things in Windows Vista and had deprecated GDI+ and at first had removed hardware acceleration).  But in more recent times, hardware acceleration has returned, particularly in Windows 7’s DWM.  This has meant we can start adding lots of cool effects.

DeskScapes 4

DeskScapes is continuing to evolve as we prepare for the day of letting pretty much everyone make their own dynamic content for it.  The idea is to make it so that the desktop background isn’t limited to being pretty but can be made into a useful area.

WindowBlinds / SkinStudio

There’s not a lot to tell (publicly anyway) as a lot of work involved with Windows 8 that we can’t discuss.

Fences

There’s been screenshots of Fences 2 floating around. We have no ETAs on it yet as seeing what is (and isn’t) doable on Windows 8 is taking up some time.  But there’s a lot of interesting new features in the works including letting users define a directory as a Fence as well as having Fence “pages”.

IconPackager

We’ve had a hard time with Windows 7 folders and we’re not sure if this is going to be cured in Windows 8.  If it’s not, we may make changing the default folders of Windows 7/Windows 8 become a “hidden” (i.e. off by default, unsupported) feature.

Program X

Not so much a secret but rather we haven’t come up with a name for it yet. It’s a program for skinning the new Windows 8 immersion UI.

Program Y

Same thing, not secret but a program that takes some of the non “FX” parts of WindowFX and graduates them to their own program.

DesktopX

I don’t have a lot of good news to report on this.  The effort in making it work well on all these versions of Windows is not going well at all.  We are still deciding its future.

Theme Manager

Theme Manager 4 has become our preferred method of applying suites.  We killed MyColors entirely.  So over the coming months you’ll see a lot of of the MyColors themes become Theme Manager .suite files.

CursorFX 3

We are looking at updating CursorFX to support the DWM but it is still in the planning stages as we’re not sure the demand vs. cost of this yet.

SoundPackager 2

This is more an area where we need to bring in more developers.  We’re hiring btw.   If you’re a great developer you can even work from remote.

Tweak 8

Just waiting for Windows 8…

Legacy Programs

Some… a lot of programs are not going to make the cut.  One decision we have made is that if we can’t make it work on Windows 8, it’s dead. That doesn’t mean we won’t still have it available but we won’t be doing updates for it anymore.  Another decision is that we will be ending support for Windows XP pretty soon. We haven’t decided a date but what it means is that after that date, we won’t be testing on Windows XP anymore on new releases. So a program may work…or it may not.  The same is true with Windows Vista.  It’s absolutely murdering us trying to support all these OSes.

So let’s look at the programs that won’t be getting love:

RightClick, TweakVista, Virtual Desktops, LogonStudio, BootSkin, MyColors, ObjectBar, Keyboard LaunchPad.  They’re still available but we won’t be supporting or updating them.

GUI Championships

There will be a GUI Championships in 2012

WinCustomize 2012

There will be a revamp to WinCustomize 2012.  It will be more evolutionary than revolutionary. The main area will be performance and new features rather than a whole new look or something.

So that’s where we’re at.

We are just grinding our way through August with another strong week on WinCustomize!  A nice variety of skins were rolled in this week, and we also had some lively discussion on the WC forums.

Now for this weeks picks!

People often ask me how to get more views and downloads for their skins.  We get a real decent amount of traffic on WinCustomize, but sometimes standing out from the rest of the pack is difficult.  We try to feature and promote people as much as we can, but there just so much that can be done by just one or two people here.  If you check out our WC Facebook page, we often post skins and news there which has introduced WinCustomize to a whole new group of people.

I wanted to share some various tips that can you and your skins get more attention, which in turns helps WinCustomize as well.  It’s a win-win!

Make a Tumblr blog. (www.tumblr.com)

These are quick blogs that people often use for photography and displaying images of all sorts.  I actually have one setup for desktop customization, but unfortunately I lack the time to post skins there on a regular basis.  Open your own blog, or even volunteer to help with this one.

Use e-mail signatures.

Whether you use a web e-mail service like Gmail or Hotmail, or a client like Outlook or Thunderbird, most have a way to create and save signatures that can be used on your outgoing mail.  Depending on what they allow, these are usually rich text or html-based signatures.  As you can see from my work one below, I have a link going to the Stardock.com page, and links to our various social networks.  E-mail is very common obviously, so placing a link to your galleries or profile is another way to spread the word about yourself.

Share Yourself!

Use social networks to your advantage.  Share your individual skins on whatever networks you have access to.  Many of these have tools like browser bookmarklets that make sharing pretty easy. 

Best places to share:

• www.twitter.com
• www.facebook.com
• www.stumbleupon.com
• http://www.delicious.com/
• http://plus.google.com

Let me make a reminder you don’t have to do any of this.  These tips are for people who are looking to expand their reach and willing to do a bit of work to achieve that.

And another week down, and another week of WinCustomize being filled with skins! 

Now for this weeks picks!

Hey, it’s the first TWiS for August!  Not a lot of news to report on this week, but we did have a steady flow of skins of which a few we will highlight today.

Now for this weeks picks!

Another month down, and another month closer to the end of this blistering summer heat.  We have a fantastic new Master skin in the gallery this week, along with some new animated and static wallpapers.

Now for this weeks picks!

People send us messages every day via Twitter and Facebook telling us how much they love using Fences to organize their desktop.  One thing I have noticed when talking with people is some don’t realize how you can customize Fences with a variety of options available.

If you don’t already have Fences, grab the free download here: https://www.stardock.com/products/fences/

I would suggest upgrading to the Pro version as it has some valuable options like automatic sorting, fading effects, and more.

Customizing the Labels of Fences

As I said, Fences has a variety of options to tweak the look of the actual Fences on your desktop.  When I find a new wallpaper or WindowBlinds skin I like, I will adjust my Fences to fit in with the overall look I am trying to achieve.  Clicking the appearance button in the Fences configuration is where we will start.

The first way to customize Fences is choosing the layout of labels.  The label is the name displayed on your Fence, and the screenshot below shows my Links fence.  In the Fences configuration you can choose not to display the label, have it always displayed, or only display on mouseover.

Adjusting Transparency

Adjusting the transparency of Fences is probably what I do most option.  I do this to make the Fences either more or less visible on the desktop, depending on what wallpaper I am using at the time.  Adjust this is really simple, just move the slider left or right to adjust the amount of transparency given. 

Coloring

If you want to really change the look of the Fence, you can use the color, tint, and saturation sliders to adjust the coloring of Fences.

Misc. Tweaks

There’s a few more options available in the Appearance section to tweak Fences even further. 

• Change label text color
• Outline the Fence area
• Fade scrollbars when inactive
• Hide shortcut arrows on icons

A feature available in the Pro version of Fences is having Fences being faded until mouseover.  Right-click on a Fence, select View, then Opacity.  Select the transparency percentage you want, and then your Fence will be faded until mouseover.

I hope this helps you customize Fences a bit more, and be sure to show us how you are using Fences on your desktop!

Among the many capabilities of Stardock’s DeskScapes, one of them is the ability to manage wallpapers on your PC.  One feature in particular is DeskScapes applying random backgrounds at set intervals.  There’s so many great wallpapers out there, there’s no reason to keep just one on there all day!

Select Random Background from the wallpaper library.

Selecting this gives you a new tab to select wallpapers both animated and static.  You also have a new configuration option.

This setting lets you choose the intervals to which DeksScapes will change your wallpapers.  Now just sit back and enjoy the wallpaper show!

Get DeskScapes here.