Rockstar is an upcoming MyColors Theme from Stardock Design.  WinCustomize Subscribers will be able to download the WindowBlinds skin for free!

Wow, it's been a busy week around these parts!  On top of Impulse and The Political Machine, there's been a ton of great skins posted to the site over the last few days.  To help wrap up the busy week, Island Dog once again comes up with his picks for some of the best work submitted over the week.  It's a fantastic selection this week too; DX Theme, Dream, icons, a RightClick skin, phenominal wallpapers and two top-notch WindowBlinds skins. Click through to the full article a...

Sometimes we spot an artist here on WinCustomize that shows a ridiculous amount of promise.  There are a lot of digital artists that post work here every single day, but now and then one comes up that does such terrific work that you just sit back and go "Wow!"  And it's even more satisfying when you can see how the artist has grown in talent over their time on the site. Today, I was browsing through the newest skins list and hit upon just such an artist; Libardo (lgp85) .  Wh...

It seems that often skinners put out dark, glassy, techy skins.  The number of Aero clones we saw when the Vista interface was first revealed is just one example.  But now and then we see some very light, airy and bright skins uploaded to the site that provide a nice contrast to or normally dark PC screens.  Here are a few of the more recent light-colored skins uploaded to the site you may want to check out... ...

One of the great features of SkinStudio 5 was the ability to directly import XP .msstyle themes and convert them into WindowBlinds skins, giving you access to the many .msstyle themes out there, but allowing you to retain the ease and power of using WindowBlinds.  Unfortunately, that feature isn't present in SkinStudio 6.  But never fear, there is actually a free, stand-alone tool to do just that! Get the XP .msstyle importer free!

Last night the Boston Celtics cruised to their 17th NBA Championship, their first in 22 years.  As Beantown celebrates, you can jump in on the fun and show off your Celtics pride with the MyColors Boston Celtics Theme by Stardock Design! Deck your desktop out in Celtics green and the look of the basketball court.  The MyColors Boston Celtics Theme comes with a skin for either Windows XP or Vista, wallpapers, terrific icons, as well as weather and media player gadgets.  L...

Why are things so quiet today?  Well, we're getting all of our ducks in a row in preparation for the big Impulse launch later today.  So for the time being, amuse yourselves.  Read a magazine.  Maybe take the dog for a walk.  Run any errands you have to do today, because once we flip the switch, it's going to be hopping around here for the rest of the day!

Yesterday the news broke that Firefox 3 final would be released to the public on Tuesday, June 17th With every new major version of Firefox, changes are made to how the browser renders pages, in an effort to get closer and closer to published standards.  Unfortunately, since the major web browsers all render pages slightly differently, custom stylesheets have to be built for each specific browser we support.  Since Firefox 3 will render pages differently than Firefox 2 did, this me...

Happy Friday the 13th folks.  Hopefully your Friday is free of bad lick, ill omens, or serial killers in hockey masks!  But if it is, we do have something to take your mind off of all of that (well not the killer part, it's hard to forget about that part).  As he does every Friday, Island Dog rounds up some of the best skins submitted over the course of the week.  This week it's a selection of cursors, dreams, icons, wallpapers and WindowBlinds. Check out his article for ...

Keeping up with his regular stream of screencasts, Island Dog yesterday put together a great video demo for WindowBlinds 6, showing users how to do everything from apply a theme, to recoloring, adjusting transparencies and blur effects, adding explorer backgrounds, using the wallpaper manager and even importing .msstyles into WindowBlinds directly. It's a great video to link to friends and family who are interested in getting into desktop customization.

Since 2005, skinning community site Customize.org has hosted the Desktopography project, an annual exhibition of stunning wallpaper art that is simply some of the best wall work I've ever seen.  Participation is by invite-only, but because of this the results are always top-notch.  The idea is that our moods can be heavily influenced by what we see every day, and for many of us we spend our days staring at a computer screen.  While it's hard to get a good nature look to your Windo...

We're quickly coming up on the full launch of Impulse, our next generation digital distribution, software management and community tool.  Impulse, as pretty much everyone should know by now, is the successor to Stardock Central, and will eventually replace the aging download tool entirely (though not immediately, it's going to be a phased retirement).  Since early this year we've had first a private group of testers hammering on Impulse, and then the larger community in an open beta t...

Every month the moderation staff here at WinCustomize is asked to pick their favorite skin submitted in the previous month and to give a bit of explanation on why they liked it.  Here are the mod picks for May: Igloo by kittymalone "It's the third month in a row I'm picking a creation by kittymalone.  I'm sorry, but I can't help it.  I'm hooked on her fabulous, easy-to-use-on-a-daily-basis creations.  In my opinion one o...

Last week MyColors Camouflage was released, along with a free matching Cursor theme by Treetog. Today, Island Dog walks through everything that comes with this great new theme for users who like a darker look to their desktop.  He shows off every bit of the theme, including the WindowBlinds skin, media, clock, calendar& weather gadgets as well as the icons. If you weren't sure about Camouflage, check out this article to get the full run-down on the outstanding work Treetog did ...

Last week we talked a bit about a potential feature for the next WinCustomize site update; Skinning Groups.  The idea is basically to add functionality to the site that would make it easier for skinners to get together and organize larger projects.  I wanted to gauge everyone's feelings on the idea so the poll was a simple Yea/Nay deal. Overall, most of you were in favor of it with about 80% saying yes to 20% saying no. A few concerns were raised in the discussion of the idea, a...