Three weeks back I made a post asking the community to come up with a series of questions they always wanted to ask the Moderator Team. Well, after over 70 replies, I was able to extract 20 excellent questions. Over the next month, I will be asking the mods 5 questions a week and posting the results each Friday for you to read, enjoy and pick apart. This week, we heard from WOM, Koasati, starone, Zubaz, Quentin94, Fuzzy Logic, elvee, Jafo, Hankers, Erk, Snowman and even Ka...
After weeks of voting, at last we present to you the full list of winners. These skins and skinners were nominated and voted on by the community. 2007 Skinner of the Year: It was a tight race, with the lead swapping between several skinners throughout the week, but after all was said and done, one skinner came out ahead and can be crowed the WinCustomize Skinner of 2007: Night Train 2nd Place: Quentin94 3rd Place: I.R. B...
You've seen Brad's article on what Stardock needs to do in 2008 , and a few of the items touched on WinCustomize and the community specifically. Now that we're into 2008, I wanted to add my own thoughts on what we accomplished on WinCustomize in 2007, what some of my goals are for '08 and what that means for the community in terms of content, events and opportunities. Looking Back at 2007: Vista, Dreams & New Opportunities 2007 was a year of change for Windows customization, there's...
Dreams are one of the newest galleries on WinCustomize, having launched at the end of January along side the announcement of DreamScene by Microsoft at CES 2007. They are the prime example of the possibilities Vista presents in terms of customization and skinning. Since the launch, it has been one of our most popular galleries, attracting countless new skinners and users looking to get the most out of their Vista Ultimate purchase. What's impressive is that the success wasn't hind...
Ok, after just a day and a half of nominations, we have 115 total unique skins, and 13 skinners. The requirement for a gallery to be voted on was that it have at least 5 skins nominated. Before we get into the master list, here are the nominated skins that won't make it to a vote: IconPackages* DX Objects Right Click Spil's Stuff Skarn's DX Bits 1 Blue Glass Carbon-ite Skarn's DX Bits 2 &nb...
To go along with The Month in Dreams, Island Dog also wraps up this week with This Week in Skinning. October ends and November starts with a bang! Two great new skins, a killer cursor pack, a cool wallpaper, a Dream, an IconPackage and a Logon screen round out some of the week's best offerings. Be sure to stop by the thread and give us your picks for the best work submitted to the site this week.
With the start of November comes another installment of Island Dog's "This Month in Dreams". This time around we have some excellent and relaxing Dreams from folks such as Muckyman, xstudio and brenopoubel. If you're a Windows Vista Ultimate user, you should definitely be giving these a look.
Over time, the list of applications supported here on WinCustomize grows and grows. Gone are the days where you only had a small handful of applications that met all of your skinning needs. While choice is great, the consequence can be that some tools don't get quite the attention that others do. There's no question that WindowBlinds is successful, we have thousands of skins from the last 8 or 9 years, and the gallery expands nearly every day. One of those apps that peopl...
WindowBlinds 6 has been a big deal for us the last few months with all the new capabilities it brings to skinning Windows Vista and Windows XP. Combined with the new version of SkinStudio, we're expecting a renewed interest in skinning and a jump in great content to pick from on the site. Though, for a lot of people, they look at screenshots and recent skins and go "Meh, so what? What's so new about this?" Sometimes I guess it's hard to see what's changed when you've...
SoundPackager is one of those applications that people have seemingly been talking about for ages, always wondering when it would finally materialize. Well, last month we finally pushed a beta of SoundPackager out the door and testing/tweaking began in earnest. To go along with this, we launched a new gallery at WinCustomize just for SoundPackager files (.soundpackage). The entire idea behind SoundPackager is that if you wanted to customize your Windows sounds previo...
We wrap up our WinCustomize Wiki Week with a page that everyone who wants to help out should check: The Work In Progress page. When you create an article, you can flag it as an incomplete page that needs more attention and assistance (a work-in-progress). These articles will be listed on the WiP page for everyone to see. This makes it much easier to quickly find out what needs some tender, loving care. You know any page on that list has people waiting eagerly for.&...
Day 4, and the Wiki week draws close to its end. So far this week we've focused heavily on tutorials on the WC Wiki, and that's because that sort of user content is the site's greatest strength. Tutorials transform a piece of software from some intimidating and obtuse application to a tool that someone can use to create great content. The best tutorials tend to come from users who know the applications best and use them on a near daily basis. That's why SK Originals and ...
Yesterday I talked about the WindowBlinds tutorials by SK Originals and held them up as a great example of how to write help content for the Wiki. But that tutorial is for the visual artist. What if you're a code monkey trying to make a desktop gadget? Sure there's art involved, but there's a lot of coding too, and that takes a completely different sort of tutorial. Pictures illustrating steps help, but they're not the whole story. You need code examples, and writi...
This year so far we've added 11 new galleries to WinCustomize in an attempt to make sure we're keeping up with what's going on in the wider world of Windows Customization. Here's the full list for 2007 to date: Avatars Dream Emoticons LogonStudio Vista Maxthon ObjectBar 2 Google Gadgets Vista Sidebar Gadgets Sidebar Styler SoundPackager Xion Now, some of these galleries have done well, others have not. Probably the two most successful...
Day two of WC Wiki Week brings us to one part of the new site that's really the key aspect of the Wiki: User-provided documentation in the form of tutorials and how-tos. A user manual is one thing, it tells you what buttons do what, and where to find various bits of info, but it doesn't really tell you how to fully use the software. This is especially true with creative tools such as Skin Studio and Photoshop when creating a WindowBlinds skin. So today's featured page is appro...