It's Friday!  Huzzah!  To celebrate the end of the week, here's a bit of a recap for you as to what's been happening in the world of skinning since Sunday.  This is just a quick run-down of stats, stories and major happenings just in case you missed anything. Submissions Ever wonder how many submissions get added to the library every week?  Here are the numbers for a few of our more popular categories: BootSkins: 18 CursorXP: 8 DesktopX Widgets: 3 ...

As part of the first video podcast for PowerUser.TV Brad Wardell recorded a video demonstration walking us through all the components of Object Desktop 2007.  This video should give users who are not familiar with the suite (or are only familiar with a part of the suite) an excellent idea of how much of their desktop they can customize with Object Desktop. To make it both more convenient and quicker to download, we've separated the video demo from the larger video podcast and uploaded it ...

According to my handy little Christmas Countdown Gadget by RomanDA, it is right now 12 days and 7 hours until Christmas.  I don't know about everyone else, but I'm still working on finishing up my Christmas shopping and there are a few people I'm smashing my head against the wall trying to conjure up gift ideas for.  If only they were geeks, I'd have such an easier time! Well, I'm going to assume some of you out there have friends or family that are of the geeky persuasion, ...

In the past week I’ve written about the new Enhanced File Dialog utility, as well as the updates we’ve made to Keyboard Launchpad in advance of the release of Object Desktop 2007, coming tomorrow (Tuesday, August 1st). Today, with less than 24 hours before the official launch of ODNT 2007, I’d like to take the time to walk you through some of the other products that have received some new features and a great deal of polish. Click on the links below to go straight to that section of the artic...

WinCustomize 2007 was mostly about building a more robust and stable foundation to handle our ever-increasing traffic and site complexity, with that accomplished we're setting our sights on 2008.  The WinCustomize 2008 project is heavily focused on improving the user experience of submitting, browsing and downloading skins.  We have spent the past several weeks internally picking over what we do and don't like about how the site works, and what we'd like to see improved.  As we w...

Ever wish that when you were going to open or save a file that you had a few more options to choose from?  Do you find the standard open/save dialogs difficult to read when there are a dozen or more files listed?  Coming to the rescue of frustrated users everywhere, Stardock presents the Enhanced File Dialog utility, a product included with ObjectDesktop.net that brings power and user customization to yet another aspect of the Windows Operating System. Enhanced File Dialog is an a...

Here at WinCustomize we talk a lot about skinning in general, be it how to best skin some UI element, what the best skinnable web browser is, or to chat about the fantastic work done by many of the artists in our community.  One thing that we don't talk a lot about are the names and faces behind the tools and applications we use. To that end, we're kicking off a new feature today, the Developer Interview Series.  The idea is to sit down with the main developers behind some of the m...

The Wiki project started many months ago after review of community feedback on Brad's "How Stardock Failed the Community" article from the start of the year.  The single biggest complaint was a lack of good resources for documentation and helpful information on the plethora of skinning products Stardock has built over the years.  Our decision was to provide a site and framework for the community to contribute their knowledge of the tools and software available.  The idea was that...

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...

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...

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 ...

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.&...

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...

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...