After nearly a month since the competition ended, we're finally ready to announce the winners of the Maxthon 2.0 Skins contest, sponsored by Maxthon and WinCustomize.com We reviewed the entries, along with the developers of the Maxthon Web Browser to select the three winners.  We were looking for creative, usable and popular.  Without any further delay, here are our winners: Most Creative - Fireworks by canmandeco-   Winner of a Canon SD800 Digital Camera ...

Here's the Day 28 Update for the WinCustomize Charity/Subscription Drive . Subscriptions: 774 (38.7% of goal) Charity Dollars Raised:  $2,590.70 (51.81% of total) I have 5 subscriptions to give away, anonymously donated by a member of the community.  Here's how you can win it... Post your Top Five reasons why you love WinCustomize.  You have until end of day Sunday, December 2nd to post.  On Monday I'll pick out my 5 favorite lists, post them here with the Mon...

  Watch as your photographs dance and glide across your desktop with Photo Dream by Stardock Design! This Dynamic Dream lets you take your favorite photos and randomly rotate them on your desktop in smooth, gliding arcs. Photo Dream has a calm and subtle animation that won't distract you from your work while looking great. If you liked Desktop Collage, you'll love Photo Dream! Features: Photos automatically change and slide across your screen Set how quickly photos change Rotate...

Here's the Day 27 Update for the WinCustomize Charity/Subscription Drive . Subscriptions: 748 (37.4% of goal) Charity Dollars Raised:  $2,504.70 (50.09% of total) We've officially crossed the half-way mark towards our charity goal!  Keep it up!  Subscriptions have really started to slow down, as have master skin purchases.  We need to step up the pace here folks!  We only have 17 days left to reach our goal!

We've been talking about it for a while now, adding suites and skins to Object Desktop so not only would you get the best customization software out there, but you'd also have some spectacular skins and other content to go along with it.  We previously released released the Quest Suite, and today we're excited to announce the second piece of premium content for Object Desktop Subscribers. Turbo! Turbo is a brand new skin from Stardock Design built by none other than our very own Tree...

For the last 10 months, using the power of Windows Vista Ultimate, DreamScene (A Vista Ultimate Extra) and DeskScapes, 2D and 3D animators have been dipping their toes in the new world of Animated Wallpapers.  Today, they have a great reason to jump in with both feet!  I'm extremely happy to announce the start of the Create Your Alienware ® Dream competition being held here at WinCustomize and sponsored by Alienware ® Fire up those graphics and animation tools and put...

Another news bit from the wire yesterday is that the Crave blog over at CNet UK threw together a great article on how to make your PC much more Mac like, if that's your thing.  Mentioned in the article specifically is Stardock's ObjectDock as the best tool for emulating the OS X dock on a PC. "One of our favourite features of OS X is the dock, a customisable taskbar that you can anchor to any edge of the screen, and even set it to duck out of sight when not in use. This gives you a go...

Yesterday, Joel Durham Jr. over at ExtremeTech posted a very detailed review of WindowBlinds 6 along with a quick look at SoundPackager.  It's a great review for people who are on the fence regarding either application.  Perhaps the biggest point made is that when benchmarking their test machine both with and without WindowBlinds 6 running, there was effectively no difference in performance!  Also in the review is a brief review of our new SoundPackager product.  Again, ...

So now that most of us are back from a long weekend filled with food, it's time to get back into the work week.  To ease the transition from the turkey you eat to the turkey you may work for, here are some of my favorite submissions that came in over the holiday weekend.  There are a few more this time since I'm going back to last Thursday as the start of the weekend. ...

Since I was on vacation last week, I wasn't able to give you all daily updates on the charity drive .  So here's the big round up for the last 10 day period.   11/16 11/17 11/18 11/19 11/20 Subscriptions 17 30 35 24 18 Charity $ $59.83 $98.73 $111.02 $74.05 $54.98   11/21 11/22 11/23 11/24 11/25 Subscriptions 20 16 23 22 33 Charity $ $82.54 $57.50 $75.75 $73.76 $108.39 Here's where we stand af...

Community veteran and all-around poor speller Zubaz recently went around to our community of Master Skinners with a list of questions for them ranging from the basics of "Why do you Skin?" to what their favorite ZubaZ skin is.  Often people in the community have wanted to know what goes on in the head of our most senior skinners, and this article series addresses that directly. Today we have Part 1 of the series available for your reading enjoyment.  In this installment, ZubaZ chat...

Island Dog is back again with another installment of This Week in Skinning.  This week, we've got a CursorXP Theme, some DX Widgets, a new Master Dream, an IconPackage, some ObjectDock goodies, a wallpaper and a WindowBlinds skin.  A pretty busy week filled with a lot of great skins.  Hop on over to the article to see the full list, along with preview images of the selected skins.

Here's the Day 15 Update for the WinCustomize Charity/Subscription Drive . Subscriptions: 480 (24% of goal) Charity Dollars Raised:  $1,555.63 (31.11% of total) At current daily rates, we will end up with 1408 subscriptions and $4563.18 raised for Childs Play. This is the last drive update posted until 11/26 as I'll be out of town next week for the Thanksgiving holiday.  Expect a mega update with a nice big number spike when I get back 

On Monday, I featured a few items in my Weekend Picks post that belonged to a pretty big community skin project.  In case you missed out, here is the complete WhiteFire set of skins as of this morning.  What started with a skin by basj has grown to include: Wallpapers Bootskins Icons Cursors DX Themes Widgets Docks and a Logon Skin This one comes from mostly the MaxStyles crew and completely caught me by surprise.  The quality is incredibly impressive.  It's nice...

We're always looking for ways to spread the word of Customization and give the wider community more ways for everyone to show off their work.  So today, I'm happy to announce the creation of a Flickr group just for WinCustomize .  Show off your current desktop, your work-in-progress skins, photos of yourself, whatever you like!  Flickr is the perfect site to share images of any kind that aren't necessarily skins but that relate to the community or skinning in general. So ...