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...
In the world of Web 2.0, the mob is where the power and intelligence is. At least that's the theory behind sites like social bookmarking site Digg.com and crowd-written encyclopedia Wikipedia. The idea is that given enough eyes looking at something, the real value and truth will float to the top. This works great so long as you're on the good side of the mob. Microsoft, as a rule, tends to be on the wrong side of the mob, the one where the pitchforks and torches are point...
In 1995, lines formed outside of stores opening at midnight to sell frenzied customers copies of the the next big thing in home computing... Windows 95. By all accounts, it was a rock star event, the launch of what really took Microsoft into the dominant OS position it's in today. That was almost twelve years ago, and now Microsoft is poised to launch its latest Windows product, which it is trying to sell as as big a technological change as the one seen from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95...
Yesterday, word came down from Microsoft that nearly a quarter of all Windows installs world-wide were classified as "non-genuine" by the Windows Genuine Advantage tool which checks license validity. Since it's launch in 2005, the system has attempted to validate 512 million users, and tagged 22.3% as invalid. That's 114,176,000 pirated copies out there in the wild according to Microsoft's statistics. The WGA program has come under heavy fire due to the system mislabling valid ins...