I had an absolutely wonderful 3-day weekend, and now I'm recharged and ready to tackle the week.  To start with, here are my picks for some of the best content uploaded to WinCustomize over the weekend.  While it was nice, sunny and warm out and everyone was probably enjoying the start of Spring, these folks were working on, and uploading skins for you to enjoy. InitRegions(); ...

Community member wulfn1 this morning posted a detailed and lengthy review of a handful of skins recently posted that she found interesting.  In her review she talks about skins ranging from I.R. Brainiac's phenomenal Rogue Proton Gold skin to great wallpapers by inception8, a soundpack by RobJK and a "quirky" IconPack by KerLoong. This is the sort of article I come to WinCustomize every day hoping to see.  It's one thing for me, Island Dog, or the moderators to point out cool sk...

ObjectDock is one of those incredibly useful tools that can help you organize your mess of icons and start menu shortcuts into something simple and easy to manage.  But often when you add an application to a dock, you see some ugly, pixelated icon that just doesn't fit with the beautiful aesthetic of your desktop.  The problem is that most application icons, at least prior to Windows Vista, are small and don't scale well at all.  To help with that, we accept high-quality applicat...

If I had to pick three things that Stardock is incredibly good at, of course I'd start off with skinning/desktop experience software like WindowBlinds, IconPackager etc, and then I'd have to say PC strategy games.  But those two sit on top of our third strength; community building. We've taken the lessons learned from WinCustomize, and Brad's own years of running BBSes "back in the day" and applied them to our gaming communities surrounding Galactic Civilizations, Sins of a Solar Empire...

The skinning community is a pretty tight-knit group of people, with a lot of us spending time on multiple sites, working with the community sites spread across the web.  Earlier this month, one of our own here at WinCustomize was promoted over at deviantArt. You know him as Stee03 here on WinCustomize, but over at dA he goes by the name mrrste and as of a few weeks ago, he is now the Skins and Themes Gallery Director for deviantArt! I hope everyone here will join me in congratula...

Now, I'll admit that I'm definitely on the outside looking in of the blogging/web 2.0 community.  While I manage very large sites with a ton of users and reach, I'm still on the periphery.  Why?  Well, I live in Michigan.  Not exactly a state known for it's thriving IT industry.  If you go beyond IT services that support manufacturing companies, you can probably count on one hand the number of companies doing anything significant with online communities or digital media.

Yes, I'm a bit of a victim of geography here, and even though it's all online now, it's all IM, Twitter, email and blogging, proximity is still important.  So when I see events like Gnomedex coming up, I'm interested because it could be one of the few opportunities I have this year to actually network with other people working in my field.  And in this nebulous profession, professional networking is king.

Ok, we're in the final weeks of development and testing on Twilight of the Arnor now, so it's really coming down to the wire for sites to put together and post their preview articles.  Video Game Generation is the latest site to put Twilight through its paces.  Nick Arvites took on the daunting task of summarizing Twilight in a few pages. Major items that Nick focused on include the unique tech trees, unique planetary improvements, improved graphics, and of course, the Terror Star!...

Stardock's forums, across all of our sites, have a grand total of 1,949 RSS feeds.  That's a lot.  Each forum has a feed for pinned and for the currently discussed topics.  That's a lot of files to manage and support!  So we decided it was time to seek out someone who had a lot more experience with hosting massive numbers of RSS feeds.  For this, we turned to our friends at Google, who have been incredibly helpful in the last few years with things like stat tracki...

The word from our friends over at Neowin.net is that Windows XP Service Pack 3 has been given a set of release dates.  Previously given a release of "2008-ish" we now have a very specific set of dates to track.  The shocker is how soon they are.  You'll be able to snag a release copy of Service Pack 3 as soon as  April 29th.  For the full set of dates, including when it will be automatically pushed via Windows Update, and a lively discussion on what's to come from...

This weeks poll is about Podcasts.  More specifically, Under The Skin and PowerUser.TV , two podcasts largely supported by Stardock and very targeted at either skinners or tech users in general.  PowerUser.TV officially went "off the air" December 2006, and Under The Skin hasn't seen a new episode since October of the same year. What I'm wondering right now is, are they missed?  Did folks in the community listen regularly, and if they did, did they like what they heard? ...

Stardock is always revising its product pages, trying to provide more and more information in an easy to access and understand manner.  In the last two years you've seen us go through many revisions to our product pages.  We've evolved from that very 1997 shareware site look to where we are today.  Our latest revision can be seen on the Object Desktop website . So last week, with the launch of Object Desktop 2008, we wanted to see what you thought of it. Turns out most ...

Monday is here again, and that means it's time for another round-up of some of the best content uploaded to WinCustomize over the weekend.  While you were out having fun, maybe running some errands, and just in general avoiding work, these fine folks were creating skins, wallpapers etc for your enjoyment. What are your favorite weekend skins?

Two MyColors NBA media bits to share with you this morning... To start with, we have MVN.com's Kurt Nordquist . After celebrating the advancement of the Houston Rockets to the NBA playoffs after a victory against the Sonics earlier this week, he stumbled upon something pretty cool; the Houston Rockets MyColors Theme.  He was so impressed with the ease of use and loved having his favorite team adorn his desktop, he's made his desktop screenshot the featured image at the top of the site....

Island Dog continues his series of fantastic video demos/walkthroughs of Stardock's products with a guided tour of Object Desktop 2008.  He starts this particular video with a brief run through of Impulse, the heir to the current Stardock Central.  From there he moves on to talk about: The differences between Object Desktop 2008 and Object Desktop 2008 Ultimate, WindowBlinds IconPackager 4 SoundPackager DesktopX DeskScapes TweakVista SkinStudio IconDeveloper The entire v...

Ahh, Friday at last!  I don't know about you, but it felt like the week just didn't want to end.  Now that we've survived to the end of the week, it's time for Island Dog to do his roundup of great skins from the last five or so days.  This week he has quite a selection for you to browse.  There are dreams, cursors, icons, docks, wallpapers and a great new WindowBlinds skin. Check out the full list here .