Today we announced the winners of the Most Original Icon Package event in the GUI Champs '06. This marks the first major prize of the contest being given away. knightpan won the EVGA GeForce 7600GS video card for taking the gold with his The Mayan Civilization icons (he has a matching WB Visual Style that's currently a finalist for Most Original Visual Style). Head on over to the site to see who our other winners are! Also, we started keeping track of what countries our ...
Hi again, looks like it's time for another poll. Not much of a ramble leading into this week's poll results, so let's just jump into it. Last week, before I posted the preview article with screenshots of some of the new site design, I asked everyone how excited they were about the upcoming site refresh for WinCustomize, just based on Brad's article talking about some of the features, from a month or so ago. It seems that the majority of you were pretty excited about it, and I imagine...
As the holiday shopping seasons approaches, computer manufacturers such as Dell, HP and Gateway were at one point worried about system sales slacking off this year as people opt to wait to buy their next machine until Windows Vista is released in early 2007. This was evidently a large enough concern, that Microsoft agreed to institute a coupon program for anyone who purchased a new PC within a certain time frame, allowing them to upgrade cheaply to Windows Vista. Today, some of the deta...
Half-way! That's where we are in the GUI Champs '06 competition. Today we announced the winners of the Most Usable Icon Package, along with the top-ten finalists for Most Usable & Most Original Visual Styles. Later on in the week we'll be announcing the Most Original Icon Package winners, bring us within two weeks of the end of the contest, and so far we will have handed out $850 in cash, $3396in software and site subscriptions, not to mention an EVGA GeForce 7600GS! ...
You've likely heard of Fantasy Sports. Games where you pick out a roster of players from a given sport, and your "team" wins or loses on the average performance of all of your players in the past week. Fantasy Football or Baseball leagues are pretty popular office games, and they give people an incentive to more closely watch the sports page of the paper on a near daily basis as they track the stats of all of their players, trying to figure out how they did in their league compared t...
The latest in the near-constant stream of beta products from Google hit the web yesterday, Google Custom Search. Custom Search allows users to essentially create their own customized search index, including only site you choose, and defining the primary keywords to help define the search parameters. This customized index can then be accessed directly via your own webpage by placing a Google search box somewhere on your site. You can even have the results output to another page ...
This time of year, back in 2001, Apple unleashed the little product that would be credited with saving the company from utter ruin, and became an unstoppable force in the portable music player market. The first iPod came on the heels of an announced 22% drop in revenue for Apple Computer, long the last-place contender in the home computer market. With floundering Macintosh computer sales, a new operating system that had only a small dedicated group excited, the company needed somethi...
A few months back, we started loosening up the requirements for what was and wasn't accepted into the public wallpaper gallery here at WinCustomize. A lot of wallpapers that wouldn't have previously made the cut, were let in, but some were still considered "below the line" and were rejected. Going forward, we will no longer be rejecting Wallpaper submissions based on quality. This however does not mean that everything submitted will be posted to the main public gallery. ...
Ok, it's a big day for Microsoft, first day that IE 7 is available in "final" form. Vista nears RTM. Office 2007 closes in on release. So there's a lot to keep the folks in Redmond busy lately. Here are a few news tidbits about everyone's favorite software company to hate: IE7 Vulnerable to Old Exploit Yes, that's right, less than 24 hours after release, IE7 already has a known and published vulnerability. And the worst part is, it's an OLD one, dating back ...
Our buddy Ron Garveston over at Geek.com , yesterday posted a very nice review of Aquarium Desktop 2006. Accompanied by several screenshots showing the software in action, Ron gives a pretty nice summary of what the program is, and what his thoughts are on it. Head on over to Geek.com now to check it out. The comments section is full of users looking back to the days of After Dark and the fish screensaver, eSheep, and even Maxis' ElFish.
We've seen articles, television shows and interviews about someone being the hair stylist to the stars, the limo driver to the wealthy, and even the parole officer to the convicted. However, that sort of fame and fortune has been beyond the grasp of most of us lowly computer folks. Well, no more! Buckingham Palace has been looking for someone to manage the computer systems across the royal household of Queen Elizabeth II. So some IT wonk (or wonkette) out there could be the ...
Polls. We do polls around here sometimes... I think. It's hard to remember anymore isn't it? Well, my to-do list says that I have a poll to update and some results to post so here we are. Hi! How've you been? Seen any good movies lately? Read any good books? Oh, right... poll... got it. Not much for small talk are you? Fine, here are the poll results from last week's poll where I asked how involved you were in this year's GUI Champs competition....
Starting today, you can pick up the Apogee, Orion and Utopia premium icon suites all in one bundle, Paul Boyer's Icon Trilogy , for the low price of $19.95! These three outstanding icon sets individually sell for $9.95, so buying them as a pack, you essentially get one free. This is a great and inexpensive way to get three distinct and high-quality icon sets for your PC. Head on over here to pick yourself up a copy! Screenshots: ...
For those of you who have been following the GUI Champs at all lately, you'll know we just finished up user voting on Icon Packages. This year, we received some of the best icon sets we've ever seen. They are probably going to be some of the best icons we see for next year! It's been torture I'm sure for all the users to just pick their favorite three, and it's going to be murder on our judges to pick their favorites from the top-ten lists we just compiled. So now that ...
For those of you who own Essorant Skin Pack #1, there is an update now available (free to all those who purchased the skin pack). The updated skin pack now makes use of the per-pixel alpha-blending in WindowBlinds 5. To download the updated pack you can use Stardock Central and just click on the "update" button, or you can go to https://www.stardock.com/support and enter your e-mail address. This will geneate an e-mail that includes your account information and download links for all of ...