Immediately after Thanksgiving, WinCustomize, in partnership with Alienware , announced the Create Your Alienware Dream Contest, a competition to create the best alien-themed .Dream.  Short of the 2006 GUI Champs, this is our biggest giveaway yet!  On the line is a $3,000 Alienware Gaming PC (Area-51 7500)!  We're two weeks in, and have just over two weeks left to enter. There is no reason not to enter if you're a US resident and have access to any animation tools (2d or 3d)...

Here's the Day 41 Update for the WinCustomize Charity/Subscription Drive . Subscriptions: 1,078 (53.90% of goal) Charity Dollars Raised:  $3,564.15 (71.28% of total) Just three more days left!  The whole thing wraps up at the end of the day Friday, so be sure to get your subscription/skin purchase in now before time runs out!  Featured Charity Skins Master skinners were asked if they wanted to donate a portion of their skins to the charity drive this year.&n...

2007 is quickly drawing to a close, and wow what a year it's been!  The new WinCustomize, Vista, Dreams, SoundPackager, Xion, WindowBlinds 6, the Charity Drive, the Alienware Contest, and more spectacular skins than you can shake a stick at! Around this time of year, a lot of sites start doing their "Best XYZ of 2007!" lists, and I thought maybe we could get in on the fun with a few of our own lists to mark the best work of the past year. Nominate your: Favorite Skinner Fa...

Here's the Day 40 Update for the WinCustomize Charity/Subscription Drive . Subscriptions: 1,058 (52.90% of goal) Charity Dollars Raised:  $3,501.63 (70.03% of total) Just four more days left!  The whole thing wraps up at the end of the day Friday, so be sure to get your subscription/skin purchase in now before time runs out! 

This week's poll will hopefully be far less contentious than last week's.  If you keep up on the larger Stardock community, you're probably aware of JoeUser, our own blogging site with a community twist.  What you may not be aware of is that the site is undergoing a major rewrite, the first since it launched in 2003 which we expect to have ready for public use early in 2008. So this week I'd like to know if you "blog" at all.  Not necessarily if you blog at JoeUser or if you wo...

Wow, last week's poll was a lively one!  And the results at the end were far and away different from how things were looking near the start of the week.  To recap, the discussion was around additional ways to support the site in the future.  One possibility that had been presented to us by our ad rep was a Site Sponsorship, a graphic that would be placed somewhere on the site for the duration of the sponsorship.  The catch is that the image would be visible to everyone, even ...

After a glorious two days of doing absolutely nothing productive, it's back to the grind of work for me.  To help ease you all back into the routine, here are my picks for the best work submitted to WinCustomize over the weekend.            

Island Dog continues his quest to round up the best holiday skins on the site.  Today, he delves into the depths of the LogonStudio library and comes up with 5 excellent skins that will help get your PC decked out in festive digs.

Here's the Day 37 - 39 Update for the WinCustomize Charity/Subscription Drive . Subscriptions: 1,036 (51.80% of goal) Charity Dollars Raised:  $3,424.63 (68.49% of total) We finally hit the half-way mark this weekend on the subscriber goal!  And we're almost 3/4th of the way to the charity dollar goal as well!  But we're down to the wire now.  There are just 5 days remaining on the Charity/Subscription drive and we have quite a way to go! So, if you haven't su...

Last month we announced that JoeUser 2 was under development.  You got a few very early mockup shots of what the site was going to look like and I talked a little bit about the improvements everyone will be able to expect.  Well, a month in and we've made some excellent progress, and we're even getting ready to start having select users test the site (more on that in a future update). Today, I'm going to take you on a tour of the site, showing off what has been implemented so far, a...

The past week or so has been a busy time in the forums with a lot of threads coming and going, some of which turned into rather epic discussions on their own.  In case you've been under a rock for the last few days, here are a few of the more interesting forum threads from the last 2 or so weeks. Weekly Poll: Site Sponsorships A very active debate on future ad placement on the site.  It's also been incredibly civil and informative.  Worth a read-through simply because the...

Another week winds down, and Island Dog digs up another list of great new skins from the community.  Diving through the newest skins list, he's pulled out a handful of what he considers to be the best content uploaded in the last 7 days.  This week, he has a lot to pick from!  2 WindowBlinds skins, a Xion skin, a wallpaper, a Dream, 2 Christmas DX widgets, and a new CursorXP theme.

Here's the Day 36 Update for the WinCustomize Charity/Subscription Drive . Subscriptions: 955 (47.75% of goal) Charity Dollars Raised:  $3,165.06 (63.30% of total) Remember, we have a copy of the Pirate Suite to give away.  Just head on over to this thread , and post how you think a pirate would describe WinCustomize.  Submissions due by end of day Sunday (12/9) Arrrr!

To go along with the subscriptions in this year's sub/charity drive, I invited our Master skinners to donate a portion of their skin sales to Childs Play over the course of the drive.  As a way of saying thanks, I'm going to be featuring the skins donated and the skinners who were generous enough to donate some of their hard-earned income to a good cause. Today, we're going to take a look at the skins donated by vStyler; Harmony, Odyssey and Sexy Harmony is vStyler's lates...

Here's the Day 35 Update for the WinCustomize Charity/Subscription Drive . Subscriptions: 938 (46.90% of goal) Charity Dollars Raised:  $3,107.05 (62.14% of total) Today we have another fun giveaway.  One of our community members donated a copy of the Pirate Premium suite for me to hand out.  How can you get this fine suite?  Easy!  All you have to do is the following: Think of how a pirate would describe WinCustomize.  Come up with a short descripti...