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...

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...

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 ...

Today a little bit of news from the "WTF?" category.  A lot of us here at Stardock are caffeine junkies of one persuasion or another.  We take our energy-jolting beverages very seriously here and have a ready supply of cola and an excellent selection of coffee to jump start us in the morning and keep us going far into the day.  Of course, we're not addicted or anything, it's not like our very existence is maintained through these stimulating supplements.  So given our hea...

Here at WinCustomize, we rely heavily on Google's AdSense program to help support the site and offset costs.  They do much better than the older style of ads which were image or animation based pieces that were distributed to a wide variety of sites, with no concern for site content.  Google ads take content off the page to figure out the most relevant advertisements to display.  The results are advertisements that might actually be worthwhile to users who view the site.  The...

Add a little bit of magic to your desktop with the Abracadabra Suite created by long-time skinner, and community member Treetog , for Stardock Design ! Updated from the classic Pixtudio suite, this new edition takes full advantage of WindowBlinds 5 to give your desktop a magical look and feel. This colossal suite comes packed with everything you need to completely overhaul your Windows desktop with a vibrant visual style, matching icons, cursors, logon screen, wallpaper and app...