Alright folks, the weekend is near!  Kind of a slow week for application releases, but that never stops the fabulous skinners from doing their thing.  Looking in the galleries, I see quite a few collaborations this week which is always great to see.  I have been thinking up ideas for a new contest, and I hope to get at least one started sometime next week. 

Now for this weeks picks!

	Centurion by BoXXi BoXXi is rocking these CursorFX themes lately, and here is another favorite.
	Prismatic by Ausvet Such beautiful colors in this .dream makes this a definite download.
	Armageddon Icons by Murex Made to match the Armageddon WB skin, these are a very cool set of icons.  Great detail!
	St. Helena Island by kenwas Another beautiful landscape scene from kenwas.  Great work!
	Excalibur by theAVMAN There’s too much to this skin to describe here, but the details and the sword is just awesome.  Download it!
	Leprechaun Majik by Vampothika This is part of the St. Patricks Day community suite, and I can’t wait to see the rest of the skins for this!

It is just about time to strike February off the calendar, and we find ourselves getting closer and closer to summer.  In case you missed it earlier in the week, ImpulseTV which debuted last week was updated this week with a couple of new episodes so be sure to check them out.  We have also had a bunch of new releases on Impulse this week, so keep reading below to see what’s been added.

News and Articles:

• Elemental: Modding
• Unit design really demonstrates a key part of the economic system
• ImpulseTV Video Walkthrough
• Elemental Beta 1G Preview
• GamePro DRM Analysis, Interview with Brad Wardell
• Elemental BETA 1G: READ ME FIRST.
• WindowBlinds Feature Friday – Textures
• Impulse Weekly Top 10

New and Updated Releases on Impulse:

• Achtung Panzer – Kharkov 1943
• Dawn of Discovery – Gold Edition
• Dawn of Discovery – Venice
• Arsenal of Democracy: A Hearts of Iron Game
• Mercenaries 2: World in Flames
• Darkstar One
• Gratuitous Space Battles
  

Weekend Impulse Buys

I thought it would be fun to use Fridays as a day to showcase features in our desktop apps. Since WindowBlinds is the king of desktop customization, I wanted to dedicate the next few Fridays to showing off some features in WindowBlinds that make it easy and fun to personalize your Windows desktop.

One of the newest features is Textures, so I wanted to show off how anyone can take image files of their favorite things and customize either Aero or WindowBlinds skin with them.  For a complete video tutorial on how to create and use textures, click here .

If you don’t have WindowBlinds already, head over to www.windowblinds.net and grab it.  Otherwise, grab some of your favorite image files and follow along, or grab the files I used here .

In the Textures tab, hit create effect and load up one of the images.  From there you can adjust them and then they are saved to the Textures folder for WindowBlinds.  They then should appear with the other included textures. 

Once your texture is ready, it can be applied by simply choosing it.  Clicking ‘edit effect’ will bring up a window where you can choose different (or the same) textures for the start menu, window frames, and taskbar.

I like the slate tiles, so I used that throughout Aero and that gave a truly unique look and feel.

Load up some textures, and the post the screenshots so we can see how you are using textures!

Mark another week off the calendar, and as a matter of fact, it’s just about time to mark another month off as well.  There was no huge skinning news this week, so lets just jump right in to this weeks skin picks!

	Smart-E by BoXXi I just love the design of this, very creative and colorful.
	Gold’N Silver by chris161 We haven’t had a RightClick skin in a while, so I’m always happy to see some new ones come in.
	TACHO-01 by d4fmac This is a very cool SysMetrix skin.  Great detail and functionality.
	Gecko by vlad Just a cute and fun wallpaper.
	Maldivian Sunset by Richard Mohler An amazing scene this is, just perfect for the desktop.  Great work!
	Acrylic 7 by danilloOc Acrylic is one of my all-time favorite skins, and how excited I was to see an updated version.

I was working with an Impulse video update this morning, and in the process I also created this quick walkthrough of ImpulseTV.

Check it out!

One of the latest features in Windows 7 was .themepacks, which are basically a wallpaper and the colored Aero style you are running.  In the last WindowBlinds 7 update, the ability was added to display installed Theme Packs as sub-styles to Aero in the WindowBlinds display.

This is a handy feature for a couple of reasons:

• If you do find a .themepack you like, managing it via WindowBlinds with all your other skins is easy.
• As with Aero, you can use the .themepacks as a base to modify Aero more using WB.
• Win7 themepacks include some awesome wallpapers, those will also show up in the WindowBlinds wallpaper area.

Get WindowBlinds at www.windowblinds.net.

This week is done, and although it was a bit quiet on the skinning front the submissions to WinCustomize never stop.  There was a good assortment of uploads this week especially in the Wallpapers and WindowBlinds galleries, so be sure to dedicate some extra time over there.

Now for this weeks picks!

	Cubicolour by muckyman This animated wallpaper has some beautiful colors and animation, grab this one for sure.
	N.C.T. (3D) by Vervi59 One of the coolest ObjectDock background sets I have seen in a while.
	Iniquity (TM Suite) This suite is the ultimate collection for the Iniquity WB and its matching skins.
	3 Rings by Ton-K300 This wallpaper just has a fantastic overall design.  Great work on this!
	Efijay by Vampothika Very classy and unique design.  This is a definite download.
	Peacock by k10wc A clean, smooth skin that takes recoloring well, so it can fit a variety of styles.

As you might have read in my earlier post , I received an ATI 5870 video card and I had to nickname it “the beast”, because this sucker is big, and that’s just how I like it.  I’m upgrading from an ATI 4850, which is another fabulous video card, but I’m certainly not going to deny myself the opportunity to try out this latest one. 

If you are interested in all the fancy numbers, you can view the technical specs here , but here are the main features from the ATI site.

• Get unrivalled visual quality and intense gaming performance and for today and tomorrow with support for Microsoft® DirectX® 11
• With ATI Eyefinity technology get the ultimate immersive gaming experience innovative ‘wrap around’ multi-display capabilities
• Tap into the massive parallel processing power of your GPU with ATI Stream technology and tackle demanding tasks like video transcoding with incredible speed
• Feel the brute strength of more than 2 teraFLOPS plowing through the most demanding games
• Experience the speed, responsiveness and performance of ultra-high bandwidth GDDR5 memory
• ATI CrossFireX™ technology with multi-GPU support offers advanced scalability

As you can see in the images above, this is obviously a dual-slot card, meaning it’s going to take up two spots on the back of your PC.  This wasn’t a problem for me as I don’t have any other PCI cards installed, but it’s something you need to take into consideration.  Installation was quick, just make sure both slots are free, snap in the card, and hook in the power.  After making sure it was securely in, it was ready to go.  Next step was booting up and installing the latest Catalyst drivers, which is a straightforward installation and I didn’t run into any issues whatsoever.

On the card it has two DVI outputs, an HDMI output, and a DisplayPort output.  In my current setup I have two 22” widescreen monitors hooked up to the DVI ports.  I’m still contemplating on what to do with the HDMI port. Anyways, after the driver installation I had to go into the display properties and easily configure Windows 7 to setup the dual-monitors to display as I want them to which is the main monitor on the right, and the second on the left.

I just installed this a day ago, so I’m going to break it in for a bit, and then follow-up with a review on the performance of the card from a user point of view, not the super technical number crunches you often see. 

Are you ready for the weekend?  I certainly am.  Let me first mention our Impulse fleet on Star Trek Online has a great group of players, and from what I hear everyone has been having a great time playing.  Going forward, we hope to have more groups forming for our Impulse community so Stardockians and our customers can have a chance to play together more often.  Let me know what you think of that idea.

This was without a doubt a super-busy week.  We had a bunch of releases on Impulse, including our beloved Sins of a Solar Empire: Trinity, and the Diplomacy expansion.  Check the links below for the list of other releases we had this week.  It’s getting to the point there’s not enough room in this article to list them all.

If you are following the development of Elemental: War of Magic, be sure to take a look at the blogs and developer journals from this week, there have been quite a few and they are all worth the read.

Lets get to the roundup!

News and Articles:

• Impulse Weekly Top 10
• Impulse Video Guided Tour
• Elemental Q&A Update with GameSpot
• Impulse enhances its top 10 list
• Sins of a Solar Empire: Diplomacy – a guided tour
• Elemental: The Tragedy of Procipinee
• Creatures of Elemental: Hordes of the Fallen

New and Updated Releases on Impulse:

• Aveyond - Lord of Twilight
• Aveyond - Gates of Night
• Bungee Jumping Simulator
• Military Life: Tank Simulator
• Tropico 3
• The Path
• Campus
• Supreme Ruler 2020 - Global Crisis
• Sins of a Solar Empire – Diplomacy
• The Sims 3: High End Loft Stuff
• Sins of a Solar Empire Expansion Bundle
• Sins of a Solar Empire – Trinity

Weekend Impulse Buys

The weeks are just flying by, and so ends another glorious week on WinCustomize.  The big news this week was the release of WindowBlinds 7.01, which is really an awesome update.  More textures, MS themepacks appear in the skin list, and more.  Don’t forget you still can grab WB7 while it’s on sale in the Impulse Store. 

Now for this weeks picks!

	My Dirty Valentine by Vampothika Just awesome, perfect for a Valentine’s desktop.
	Aero Station by RedneckDude This caught my eye as it’s a very clean DX theme, and looks really cool when applied.
	Gold Sunset by Ausvet A very subtle, but very beautiful scene which makes for a perfect animated wallpaper.
	Blue Power by PhK-Dan10 This is a minimal wallpaper, but it looks sweet when on a big monitor.
	Armageddon by Xiandi The textures and details in this WindowBlinds skin are immaculate!  Great work on this.
	AR32 by don5318 These Xion skins are something else, fantastic details look stunning.