Every month I ask the WinCustomize moderators to go through the skins submitted over the the previous 30 days and pick out their favorites and provide a little bit of explanation on why they like it.  Here are the Moderator Picks from all skins submitted in the month of February...       Artifice by mkorashy "An excellent skin, clean, clear and very usable.  What's so remarkable about this skin though, is it's mkor...

I have to say, 2008 has been a great year so far for skins.  Dreams have been steadily improving, and Island Dog's weekly roundup has highlighted some of the best work I've seen in ages.  This week is absolutely no exception either! This week we have Unity by Tiggz, one of the best icon packages I've seen on the site in ages, two outstanding wallpapers, two top-notch WindowBlinds skins and more.  Any kind of drought we were going through for good skins in months past seems to h...

Since we've been around for seven years, we've seen a lot of people come and go from the userlists.  As I've said, in that time we've seen several million folks stop by long enough to create an account with us.  In those years, the composition of the community has changed greatly.  A lot of the prominent faces around today weren't here back in 2001, and a lot of the folks from 2001 have since moved on to other things. So while everyone knows the general story and history of Wi...

With WinCustomize turning 7 today , I thought it would be interesting to browse through the gallery archives to see what sort of skins people were uploading back in March of 2001, with the launch of the brand new site.  When WC launched, there were only a small handful of galleries: WindowBlinds, IconPackager, DesktopX Objects, ObjectBar, PocketBlinds, LiteStep, WinStep, Wallpapers, Windows Media Player, Winamp, WebBlinds, ICQ Plus v3.  A dozen galleries to our current 50.  A...

According to what I've been able to dig out of the Internet Wayback Machine, today is WinCustomize's 7th birthday! Originally launched on March 13th, 2001 in the aftermath of the dot-com bust that took out many popular skinning sites, specifically the original Skinz.org, WinCustomize is now the largest site on the Internet dedicated to GUI Customization with over 1 million pageviews per day, serving visitors from all over the globe.  Today, our combined galleries hold over 75,000 us...

When new submissions slow down in a gallery, it's always fun to see what was uploaded in years past, or what is the most popular content of all time.  Today I was skimming through the IconPackager gallery and decided to check out which packs have the most downloads of all time.  I assumed that it would all be stuff from 2001, 2002, 2003 since they'd have been on the site the longest, but they jumped around in terms of date. Here are the top five downloaded IconPacks of all time on W...

As DeskScapes 2.0 draws nearer (it's been available as a beta to Object Desktop subscribers for a little while now), I thought this would be a good time to highlight some of the great Dreams the community has been creating and uploading lately.

It's almost that time again, time for a refresh and a new snapshot of Object Desktop for 2008.  This year, in addition to the regular refresh to the suite of customization tools, we're splitting it up into two separate groups: Object Desktop and Object Desktop Ultimate. The Guided Tour explains exactly what that split means, and talks about new tools such as Impulse, an updated DesktopX, the new MyColors and more. It's a great read and should give you a good idea of what to expect ...

Tutorial articles showing you how to use an application through screenshots and blurbs of text can be very helpful in learning your way around a tool, but often even with screens and text, it can be confusing on how exactly to access a given feature or option. To that end, Island Dog has been working on a series of Screencasts, narrated video walkthroughs of several skinning/customization applications, focusing on specific features within the applications His Screencasts so far: Win...

As we've worked on updating the look and feel of the forums, we realized it was finally time for some new emoticons/smileys.  Our previous set, designed by CerebroJD had served us well for many years, but it was time to look to the future for something new.  Since we have a community of incredibly talented visual artists, I turned to you seeking a new smiley set. While it got off to a slow start, you pulled together some terrific smiley sets.  Here's what we had to choose from:...

Last week's poll was a surprise.  People actually voted against the idea of a brand new gallery on the site, and when I've talked about other new galleries in the past the general response seems to either be "meh" or "no" so it raises a question in my mind.  Does the community on the whole want the site to expand in its coverage to cover new types of skinning?  With the advancement of cell phones, PDAs, and web-based applications, the world of skinning has grown drastically pa...

Polls are interesting things.  Sometimes you ask what you think is a no-brainer, a question that could only have one reasonable outcome, but then you're surprised when it turns out to be the exact opposite.  Last week's poll worked just like that. Last week I asked if users would like to see WinCustomize add a cell phone theme gallery to the offering.  My expectation was that everyone would be up for more customizable content on the site.  More skins = more users and that...

Ok, this time change is wreaking havoc on my body.  The alarm going off at what felt like 5am just wasn't the way to start the week.  But my grogginess and lack of sleep won't get in the way of rounding up the best skins from the last weekend.  So while I go for my 5th cup of coffee for the morning, you all can feast your eyes on some great skins...  

Skinning is the focus here.  We're always talking about individual skins or suites.  A cool WB skin here, some great cursors there and so on.  Rarely though do we talk about how great different skins look when they're mixed and matched in combinations even the authors never anticipated.  Our Screenshots gallery exists just for that purpose though. Every now and then it pays to wander through the gallery to see what people are using and how cool it looks. Here are some ...

This week just flew by!  Well, to help you wrap up your work week, Island Dog is here with a fantastic selection of skins uploaded over the last week.  So far this year we've been seeing week after week of great work being submitted, and this week is no exception. Check out the article for the full list of skins, see what you might have missed.