Another week has flown by, and at last we are at the weekend.  Lets first start off by saying congrats to the winners and a big thank you to everyone who participated in the Spring 2010 wallpaper contest. Another contest should be coming up soon!

Now for this weeks picks!

	Fire Starter by Vampothika Just fantastic!  This is a CursorFX theme that you need to download now and show your friends.
	Distant by Ausvet A real nice, subtle .dream perfect for a darker WindowBlinds theme.
	NoNix Folder Icons by sAARGe Need a set of folders for your desktop or dock?  Come check out this pack.
	Robot by Sc4rfy This is an awesome design.  Download it!
	The First Man Welcome Aliens by vlad Space Day was this week, and vlad has created a wallpaper to honor the day.
	Arsenic by danilloOc A very slick WindowBlinds skin with a minimal and usable design.  Great work.

Lots of folks have been asking recently how to change the cursors in Windows 7.  Well here is a quick screencast to show you how!

Download CursorFX from www.cursorfx.com.

After a nice long holiday weekend last week we are back!  Everyone has been pretty busy behind the scenes lately.  We have the Elemental betas being worked on, and the Impulse publishing crew has their hands full with releases and updates for Impulse.  I have been really excited with the classic games that have been added to Impulse lately, and it seems I am not the only one judging from the comments we have been receiving on Twitter and Facebook.

Speaking of classic games, Total Annihilation was updated with the Battle Tactics expansion which is a free update for existing customers, and at just $10 it’s a real bargain for those classic game hunters.

Lets take a look at some highlights from the week on Impulse, and be sure to follow @stardock and @impulsedriven for more!

News and Articles:

• A walkthru of Beta 1Z
• Gaming and The Cloud
• Elemental: Rebuilding a civilization
• Our Demigod task list
• Gaming Nexus Review of Sins: Trinity
• This Week in Skinning - April 9th
• What Are Your Current Impressions of Windows 7?
• Impulse Weekly Top 10
  

New and Updated Releases on Impulse:

• Call of Juarez
• Mayhem Intergalactic
• Trine 1.06 update
• Total Annihilation
• Adam's Venture
• Avencast: Rise of the Mage
• Plain Sight
• Dead Space
  

Weekend Impulse Buys

Happy Friday to all our friends and community members out there.  I hope you had a good week, and have a fun weekend planned ahead.  Today we will end the Spring wallpaper contest and begin taking a look at the entries.  Hopefully we can announce the winner some time next week. 

Now for this weeks picks!

	Colour Waves by Ausvet This animated wallpaper has a beautiful mix of colors and movement.
	White Detail by IvoneDaFont This is a great example of how simple can still be fabulous.  Great work!
	CARDINAL RED Tile by ahabkaba A really cool set of tiles for your ObjectDock backgrounds.  Nice color and design.
	Svetle by bk13GarbageMan A sweet set of RightClick themes for the Svelte Master WindowBlinds skin.
	The Point by teddybearcholla This design just caught my eye, and I really enjoy the simplicity of it.  Nice work!
	Melture for Windows 7 by lypnjtu This is a very slick WindowBlinds skin with some great details.  Definitely make this a download.

I can’t believe it’s been 9 years since WinCustomize.com first launched.

Today I’m taking a look at the 4th iteration of WinCustomize during that time.  The iterations have tended to reflect the particular skinning age they were developed in.  Let’s look at them.

The First Age of Skinning

 This was the age of “Skinz”. It was literally a cottage-sized community. Mian. Toasty. Shoggot. Doreen. These were just a few of the names from back then. Skinning was such a niche back then that there were only a handful of skinners. The tech was primitive, buggy and often unusable. But it was fun.

WinCustomize launched at the first age was ending. The original skinz.org went down along with other skinning sites as the “dot com bomb” went off taking out the means to pay for these sites.  Software developer Stardock decided to create a site and hand it over to the community. That was the original WinCustomize concept launched at the end of March 2001.

The first WinCustomize was designed as a quick way to get to a ton of different skinning libraries and had a major focus on the skinners themselves.  When you came to WinCustomize.com, the home page focused a great deal on the skinners themselves.

The Second Age of Skinning

The Second age was the era of intense competition. Some might call it the golden age of skinning. Skinning had gotten popular and there were lots of people making skinnable programs.

We had widget wars (DesktopX vs. Konfabulator vs. Samurize vs. etc.).  We had skinning wars (WindowBlinds vs. Msstyles). Media player skinning wars (Winamp vs Media Player).

This was the period of the GUI Olympics where the popular skinning sites (back when there were several) got together and competed in making skins of various types.

The Second age was the noontide of diversity in skinning. The second WinCustomize focused much more on the world of skinning itself rather than on the people who made it. It still had quick access to all the libraries but the focus now was on the skins themselves.

Skinning had gotten mainstream. It also came to an abrupt end on January 30, 2007.

The Third Age of Skinning

The the age could be described as the twilight of skinning. I’m just calling a spade a spade.  Windows Vista had begun to make skinning seem quaint and retro. Who are these weirdos taking a perfectly clean, nice OS and adding a bunch of crap to it?

The number of actively developed apps started to drop quickly. By the end of it, Stardock was the only company with full time developers still making programs for the express purpose of skinning things. Konfabulator had been bought by Yahoo. Hoverdesk was gone. TGT Soft had closed down.

There were still people out there making skins professionally. WinStep continues forward.  The Skins Factory created Hyperdesk and updated it to support Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7.

There was also a GUI Championships in 2008 where China emerged as a leader in skinning.

The skinning community had changed drastically. It moved from being a community of skinners to being a community of consumers. The expectations on the quality of the software and quality of the skins had increased to the point that only full time professionals could really produce the king of “assets” that were acceptable to consumers. Part of this was because Windows Vista/7 had become so good on their own that the bar had been raised beyond most casual skinners.

In the beginning, skins were made by guys like me:

Early skins were easy to make: This screen shot represents all of the art assets in the whole skin

Today’s skins require a great deal of time and effort.

The software, when it ran, tended to crash often. The skins were simple. But compared to Windows itself, it was all an improvement.

By the end of 2009, skinning, which had started out as a niche techie hobby had become a niche consumer hobby. Nothing highlighted this more than the recent updates to DesktopX and ObjectDock where users complained loudly at various aspects of how the beta was handled. They weren’t users anymore. They were customers of a product.

The challenge to skinning in this new age remains daunting. Producing high quality software and content in which people expect to pay nothing or virtually nothing for. In a world where a 500 line iPhone game sells for $0.99 and can sell 50,000 copies easily, it becomes harder to produce a 250,0000 line program that people are outraged to pay $20 for – even it if includes professionally created skins and themes.

And so that’s how the third age ends. Not with a bang but with a whimper.

The Fourth Age of Skinning

The goal of the fourth age is to get back to skinning’s roots: Appealing to techies who want to do interesting things to their computer. The new website tilts very much back over to skinners. The home page provides quick access to the top skinners (the age 3 site didn’t even list skin authors on the home page). It’s also designed to be much cleaner and more approachable.

There is a definite migration away from commercialization and back into grassroots. While “Master skins” and such are here to stay, there’s a lot less advertising on the site. The subscriptions will soon be changed to only be $19.95 but no longer provide “premium suites” as part of the subscription but instead site specific services and features.

The site will increasingly return to the original mission of being a community site for the customization of things.  The site’s new design lends itself to a lot more user customization (for subscribers anyway). We’ll talk more about that in the coming weeks.

We are pretty excited about the new site and the new era for skinning.  Over the coming months, we expect to be able to introduce more and more features that allow skinners and the community to interact and share creations.

The Fourth Age is scheduled to begin this month. But you can see a sneak peek at www.wincustomizetest.com.

So it’s been many months since Windows 7 was released to the public, and during my travels on the web, I have seen praise from so many people about how they are enjoying Windows 7.  Some of these are even coming from Mac users which really should tell you something.

My experience has exceeded my initial expectations, and I enjoy using Windows 7 every single day.  Performance has been outstanding on my main rig, which is obviously quite powerful, but I can say the same thing for my Acer Netbook which I also have Win7 installed on. 

Obviously I run quite a few games and applications, and haven’t had one single issue with one, including older applications.  On the customization side, having apps like Fences, ObjectDock, and WindowBlinds make the desktop experience that much better – especially in terms of organization.

Now that many of you have had quite a bit of time to use Windows 7, what are your current impressions so far?

I wanted to take a few minutes and start posting some screenshots of the new configuration interface in ObjectDock 2.0.  It’s very user-friendly, but in case you haven’t seen it yet, this will give you a good idea of what it does and looks like.

www.objectdock.com

At long last we reach the weekend!  This was an extremely busy week with some great news and releases hitting Impulse.  First up, we have Apogee bringing classic titles on Impulse including Duke Nukem 3D, Blake Stone, and more.  I hear Duke Nukem has been occupying the lunch-time LAN games this week also, so come grab some of this classic action.

Another release of note this week is Majesty 2: Kingmaker, which is the expansion to the popular strategy game Majesty 2.  This expansion brings the “Return of Grum-Gog” campaign with 8 new missions, a mission creator toolset, and much more. 

If you are a Twitterer, follow @stardock and re-tweet this to win some Apogee games!

News and Articles:

• Beta 1Z next week…
• Tweak 7/Tweak Vista Updated Today
• Rock, Paper, Shotgun Interviews Brad Wardell on the Future of Impulse
• IGN has an Elemental: War of Magic Preview Up
• Tiny ObjectDock 2 beta video demo

New and Updated Releases on Impulse:

• Seven Kingdoms II
• Majesty 2: Kingmaker
• Bob Came in Pieces v1.30
• Duke Nukem 3D – Atomic Edition
• Gratuitous Space Battles v1.36
• Rise of the Triad
• Blake Stone: Planet Strike
• Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold
• Hacker Evolution - Untold w/Flight Zero
• Freight Tycoon Inc.
• Duke Nukem Manhattan Project
• Clover: A Curious Tale
• Tweak7
• The Settlers 7 - Paths to a Kingdom
• CursorFX Plus
• Memory Clinic
• See more…

Weekend Impulse Buys

Welcome to Friday once again my friends!  Well we had a bit of an up and down week as we were hoping to get the new WinCustomize launched, but things happen and it had to be delayed for a bit, but not worries it will be here soon enough. 

Lets get started with this weeks picks!

	Svelte by the AVMAN This is a slick CursorFX theme made to match the Svelte WB skin.
	Hot Ring by Ausvet A fabulous animation for this .dream, and be sure to pair it with a darker WindowBlinds theme.
	Sweet Music of Night by DEVJIT I just love this scene!
	Natal for XP, Vista + 7 by Mrrste We have been getting a lot of dark WB skins lately, and add another great one to the list with this one.
	Intrada by essorant Going from dark to light now with a sleek Master WB skin from essorant.  Colors are perfect.  Nice work!
	En-Gauge by BoXXi Another detailed and creative Xion skin from BoXXi.  Great job!

Here's a Tour of WinCustomize 2010!

The Videos

Part 1

Part 2

 

A review of the new site versus the old site

The Main Page

NEW:

The new main page is much cleaner and yet, provides access to a lot more useful stuff.

From the page you can access with a single click:

1. virtually every gallery,
2. the featured skins,
3. the top skins (today’s favorites, 30 days, all time)
4. top skinners (today’s favorites, 30 days, all time)
5. featured master skins,
6. newest skin,
7. latest news,
8. newest master skins
9. recent forum posts
10. featured articles

By contrast, the current site lets you get:

1. virtually every gallery
2. featured skin
3. today’s favorites
4. top master skins
5. featured articles
6. latest news
7. recent forum posts
8. poll

Of course, to get to those 8 things you need this much space:

OLD:

With the benefit of hindsight, it’s amazing that the old WinCustomize doesn’t even display the newest skins on the home page. It only displays the top 3 most popular skins of the day. You have to scroll down to see what’s new on the forums. If you want to see the most popular skins of the last 30 days you have to go through several steps on the old site.

The Gallery

  

NEW:

What I really like about the new gallery is that it’s now very easy to access context-relevant information like the top skinners in a given gallery and the most popular ones without having to do special sorting options.

 

 

 

 

By contrast, the right side was dominated by a parade of little icons for getting to the other galleries (on the new site, just mouse over explore just like on every page to get elsewhere). As a result, users were bombarded with a LOT of stuff, most of which was not relevant.

 

Skin View

NEW:

When you click on a given skin, you now has quick access to other skins made by that skinner. It’s easy to just go to the next skin in the gallery as well as an intuitive way to get back to the list of skins in that gallery (before you would have to hit the back arrow in your browser every time).

You still get instant access to all the other galleries and forum posts and such because of the universal mouse-over menu at the top.

By contrast…

OLD:

First off, note how much more screen space is needed to present less information. If you want to go to the next skin in the gallery, you have to hit back and then click on the next one.  There’s no info on what other skins this author has done. There’s no easy list to see what’s popular in this skin gallery from here. The thumbnail is blurry and hard to view.  Big walls of text.

SEARCH

NEW:

Click on the drop down to pick a particular gallery or search the entire site.

OLD:

Pray it works.

 

So those are some of the highlights of the new site.  Under the covers, once the server stuff is fully configured, it should be vastly faster too but like with the old site, it will probably take a few weeks to weed out various critical paths that need to be tweaked.