In case you missed it yesterday, Brad broke the big news that Stardock has teamed up with Dell to provide a custom dock application for its consumer desktops.  In fact, starting Monday of this week, Dell PCs started rolling out the door with the new dock.  The Dell Dock, built by the team that brought you Object Dock, is focused on cleaning up the desktop and improving the user experience for Windows Vista users. For all the details on this new deal, read Brad's full article .&nbs...

To go along with his earlier guided tour article taking you through the paces with IconPackager 4, yesterday Island Dog posted a new screencast to visually step you through all the great new features of IconPackager 4 and it's redesigned interface. The full video is about 6min long and covers all the topics from the original article.

Take your desktop to the final frontier with Red Giant by TheMasterBaron Red Giant is one of the best video dreams I've seen on the site in ages.  It's a high-resolution video that runs for a full 3 minutes with a seamless loop.  The motion is smooth, and the colors bright enough to look cool but not distract the user. Red Giant is available for just $3.99 (but WinCustomize Subscribers get a 20% discount!)  Snag a copy today.  If you're a Windows Vista user, this...

Time for another weekly poll.  This week it's a pretty simple question: How often do you change skins?  Is it frequently, or only a few times a year?  Can you even remember the last time you changed skins on your PC? Vote in the poll, leave your comments here.  Results next week.

This week I'm back with a new microphone.  For Episode 5, Spencer and I are joined by DX Guru, David Roman (RomanDA).  The three of us ramble on and on this week about all things DX, including Roman's upcoming DX community site.  The three of us were having such a good time recording the show the other night that we went a bit beyond our 20min goal.  In fact, we almost hit 40 this week.  We hope you'll forgive us and enjoy the show despite our rambling and joking  ...

This week ZubaZ has another in his ongoing Ask a Master series.  Today he talks with DesktopX guru RomanDA about his background as a skinner, his many DX gadgets as well as numerous thoughts on skinning and the community in general. It's a great interview that everyone should take the time to read. Expect more RomanDA-related goodness later this morning too 

About a week and a half ago I put up a poll asking for people's opinion on the changes to the WinCustomize Subscription .  We changed the pricing and added in 12 Stardock Design skins per year.  On the whole, we felt it was a good deal and worked out especially well for our long-time subscribers who have their subs renewed out to 2020 already.  But while we thought it was good, I wanted to get a feel for how the community received the idea. On the whole, 69% of you either ...

I hope everyone had a terrific weekend, I know I certainly did!  But now it's Monday once again, so we're back at it.  Thankfully it's light out earlier so it's a lot easier to get out of bed in the morning.  I've definitely been enjoying the nicer weather and longer days.  Since it's Monday, that means it's time for another weekend round-up of my favorite skins.  A pretty good selection this time around. ...

With the earthquake in central China this week and the number of our community members who have been affected by the disaster, plus the recent cyclone in Myanmar, we've been asked by several folks about doing something in the way of donations or aid, as a community, to help out the victims of the recent disasters.  While we've done our own charity drives in the past, such as the Childs Play drive last year, because of the immediacy of the need for relief in these regions, we wanted to ...

Well, it looks like Island "No New Taxes" Dog tore himself away from The Political Machine 2008 long enough to actually do his weekly skins roundup for us.  And despite him putting the preview together between turns in the game, it turned out pretty well  and is just packed with great skins this week. On display this week are two Impulse related skins, a dream by CarGuy1, a dock, some dock icons, a wallpaper and an updated JJ Ying WindowBlinds skin.  This is probably one of ...

With the impending full launch of Impulse, we've been having some fun with Impulse-related skins.  Yesterday, Seabass posted an Impulse themed cursor set he's been working on in his spare time (yes, in addition to providing fine technical support, he also does 3d art and animation). The Impulse cursor set is built for CursorFX and is packed with animations.  If you watch the ball closely, you'll see that the core shown through the lightning bolt cut-out is constantly in motion. ...

Stardock is proud to announce the release of IconPackager 4. IconPackager allows users to easily, and safely, change nearly all of the Windows icons at once using icon "packages".  IconPackager 4 has been through quite the overhaul, one of which is the most noticeable is the completely new user interface. There are hundreds of these packages available for download on WinCustomize.   Creating or modifying an icon pack is as simple as drag and dropping your own icons.  Us...

Every so often I get an e-mail or PM asking what the user levels on WinCustomize mean, and how people go about getting promoted.  So instead of continuing to write one-off responses, I've put up what I hope is a clear and definitive guide to the WC user levels, what they are, what benefits they hold and how the moderators go about selecting folks for promotion, and what we consider when making the final decision. I encourage everyone to take a quick look over the article, see where they...

Island Dog has put together another great screencast.  This time, it's an introduction to ObjectDock Plus.  The video walks you through the differences between ObjectDock and ObjectDock Plus.  Topics covered are dock customization,  tabbed docks, the weather docklet, adding shortcuts, icons, custom flyouts and even how to use ObjectDock as a complete task bar replacement. Check out the full screencast here .

Last week I posted a little preview of the upcoming changes to the WC Help page .  The idea was to make the page easier to navigate, easier to read, more inviting/friendly and give us the ability to expand on the help resources we could provide on the page.  The old help page was just a bunch of link lists that weren't very organized and hadn't been updated in years.  The format of the page and the content itself basically ensured that virtually no one would use it.  We als...