When the GUI Champs '06 were announced late this past August, we made mention of some premium sponsors that would be handing out some of our top competition prizes.  Much was made about how these were some sweet prizes and definitely worth competing for.  We've already announced NVIDIA/EVGA sponsoring the prizes for the Most Original Visual Style and Most Original Icon Set, so that only leaves one prize, and thus one more premium sponsor to reveal. We are extremely happy to anno...

Late last week, the rumors began to fly that Google was thinking about buying Internet video site, YouTube for the princely sum of $1.6 Billion.  Well, the New York Times went and confirmed the rumors on Friday after talking with several people close to the deal.  It is stressed that the deal is in the very early stages at the moment and nothing is definite. Google is just the latest in a parade of companies to visit and chat with YouTube in recent months.  This is just the...

In case you've been waiting to vote on Most Original Wallpaper until the last minute, well, time is running out!  At midnight tonight (Eastern Time) voting will be closed for Most Original Wallpaper.  The next time you'll be able to vote on a Wallpaper event will be in November for the Best Overall event.  So get moving and vote if you haven't already! When Wallpaper voting closes tonight, voting for Most Usable Icon Package will begin.  Currently there are 37 submitted ...

If you mosey on over to the GUI Champs website, you'll see a pretty exciting announcement at the top of the page; our first premier sponsor!  So far we've announced prizes being offered up by Stardock (software, a pile of cash and some XBox 360s), as well as what some of our friends in the community are pitching in ( Microangelo Toolset 6 , DeviantArt 1yr subscriptions).  We made a fair number of veiled references to some mysterious "premium" sponsors but have been pretty quiet ab...

Today, Google Labs released a beta for a new search service targeted at computer programmers; Google Code Search .  This new service will crawl the vast stores of publicly available code (mostly open source) to provide programmers with an easily searchable index of code to help find solutions to various programming tasks. Google expects this new search tool to be mostly used by students trying to learn complex programming languages, while being an occasional resource to more season and ...

The GUI Champs '06 marches on!  Since Monday, you've been voting on Most Usable Wallpaper.  Today, we're shifting gears a bit and begin voting on Most Original wallpaper.  Most Original Wallpaper Usable was all about, well, usability.  The Most Original Wallpaper event doesn't have anything to do with easy of use, icon readability or any of that other fuzzy feel-good sort of stuff.  This event is all about pure "cool".  What is the most outlandish, a...

In a world where Google dominates the online landscape, and often a company's fortunes rise and fall along with their Google PageRank, it's no surprise that newspapers, often slow to catch up to the advance of technology, are finding that their favorite, catchy headlines, make it impossible for readers to find their stories through popular search engines.  The witty taglines that are interesting to read and chuckle at over your morning coffee don't perform well when users search by descript...

Seems that the much-touted Family Pack discount program for copies of Windows Vista Home Premium got off to a rocky start.  Early adopters who went in for the discount in the first few days of Vista's availability received keys that didn't work with Windows Vista.  Microsoft said they were in fact valid keys, but just for some other product they refused to identify. Today Microsoft said they were in the process of issuing new keys to anyone who might have received an incorrect key ...

Sometimes, bugs are just too funny to not talk about.  Of course we expected a fair share of gotchas with Vista that would have slipped through testing, and this is one I can't imagine anyone in QA would have thought to build a test case for.  Turns out, if you have speech recognition turned on in Vista, and are using speakers instead of a headset, the possibility exists for someone to play an audio file on your computer that will cause your computer to run unauthorized tasks. Grant...

Time to retire the current poll asking for feedback on the new WinCustomize.com.  In the two weeks we ran the poll, 1,024 votes were cast, making it one of our more successful polls to date.  We were looking for the general reaction to the new site design and here's the general gist of things: Fully 58% of you either loved it or really liked it. About 16.8% of you are OK with the site. 5.96% are simply indifferent. And we've inflicted emotional pain and suffering upon a whopping ...

The Zune Digital Music Player is Microsoft's bid to unseat the Apple iPod as the dominant device in the portable music player market.  It launched late last year and managed to capture 10.2% of the hard drive based player market in that short time, but has been a target of technical criticism and has failed to spark the sort of cult-like following Apple has with its iPod. The leader of that group at Microsoft, Bryan Lee, has announced plans to leave the company soon to pursue other inte...

A lot of you have been asking in the forums and on IRC what the current status is on various Stardock applications and their path to being "Vista Ready."  Well, you've already seen Brad's roadmap, which outlines some of the cooler things we have going forward, but I thought it would be helpful for everyone to have a more to-the-point chart with current status, and some vague target dates.  This is a peek at what we're aiming for in the first half of 2007.  Remember this is just a...

Windows Vista marks a new era in desktop customization.  Last week we launched a gallery for LogonStudio Vista, and we've been hard at work with WindowBlinds 5.5 and a version of IconPackager that will allow you to keep your favorite icons and skins when you make the leap and upgrade.  But there's one aspect of customizing Vista that comes built-in; Sidebar Gadgets. Today we've opened up the Sidebar Gadget Gallery here at WinCustomize.  In order to give the gallery the ...

January 30th, the day set by Microsoft for the consumer release of Windows Vista is already upon us... depending on where you live.  If you live in New Zealand, you were in the first market to be able to walk to a store and purchase yourself a copy of the new operating system.  A few hours behind the New Zealanders, comes our friends down under in Australia, and then almost a full day later, those of us in North America will get our chance. GeekZone has the story of the New Zeal...

Windows Vista releases to the public next week, and a lot of us here in the skinning community are trying to get a grasp on what that's going to mean for us.  What are the technical hurdles?  Have certain aspects of the UI been locked away?  What are the changes?  There are a lot of questions floating around out there right now and most of us don't have a whole lot of answers. To address this and hopefully spark more discussion, Brad Wardell has posted a 10-point article ...