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.

Did you know that JoeUser, as it stands right now, recently passed the four year mark?  Hard to believe the site has been around that long, giving many of us a digital home in the information wasteland that is what folks now call the "blogosphere".  It was September 9th, 2003, JoeUser changed from just the personal blog page for Brad (Draginol/Frogboy) and became the community site you see before you now.  While visually and perhaps functionally the site hasn't changed a great ...

Today, we are kicking off the 2007 WinCustomize Subscription Drive .  2005 was the last time we made a major and dedicated appeal to the community asking for their support in helping to keep the site alive and running, and we were incredibly pleased with the support you all showed through the purchase (or renewal) of subscriptions.  It was that support that helped us continue to offer and expand the services on WinCustomize that everyone has come to enjoy and even depend on over the ...

As November kicks off, Jafo has started the monthly screenshots thread where you can show off your amazing desktop skin selection.  Put together your favorite combination of skins, icons, walls, docks etc and show us what it looks like! Right now we've got Jafo sporting the Magic Desktop, Fuzzy Logic with R.I.P 2007, HG_Eliminator with an Alienware suite, and a custom mix from Nimbin, BuddhaV10 and Diafragma.

Looking for a new high-quality skin?  Love giving your desktop that dark blue look?  Then you probably want to take a peek at the latest WindowBlinds skin from Night Train: Brio XP It's clean, well-designed skin that will go well with most dark and tech-y looking icons and wallpapers.  It even has a bit of a retro feel to it with the buttons on the start bar and the window borders.

Ghost, goblins, things that go bump in the night.  Tonight is Halloween when all sorts of unsavory and ghastly things come out of their dark corners and roam the streets.  Your porch may be decorated with jack-o-lanterns and grisly scenes of death, but what about your PC?  Here are a few skins and themes for you to check out Rest in Peace 2007 is an update to one of our most popular holiday themes.  If you want this great theme, there are only two ways to get it rig...

This year, we're bringing back the WinCustomize Subscription Drive.  It's now been just over two years since the last time we made a dedicated push/appeal to the community to help support the site.  It's especially important this year since we've added Dreams to the vast pool of available content to download, which are very storage and bandwidth intensive, which of course is pretty expensive. But this time around we're doing something a little different.  It's not just a subsc...

Yesterday, Brad Wardell wrote and posted an article here on WinCustomize titled " Ten Cool Things about Vista you may not have heard of ".  It was a quick run through of some of the little-known but incredibly useful features hidden away in Windows Vista.  If you're a Vista user, or considering making the switch, I would highly recommend the article.  If you're interested in a much longer and more in-depth look at Vista, there's also my original set of "Tour" articles from earlie...

While I linked these two in my "Weekend Picks" article yesterday, I realized today that they deserved a little bit more attention and a feature all their own. Carbon-ite is a theme set by Z71 made up of a WindowBlinds skin, IconPackager pack, a logon skin and a wallpaper. If you like any of Z71s previous work, especially StingRay with its dark blue look, you'll really enjoy Carbon-ite.  And honestly, how many complete icon packs are you seeing lately?  Z71 deserves major kudos for t...

It's always exciting when a new Master Skin is released, especially when it's one from WinCustomize Master vStyler.  Today, we released Harmony for general consumption.  It's an amazing skin that comes in two varieties: Windows XP and Windows Vista, and is built for WindowBlinds 6.  In vStyler's own words, Harmony is his "most complete work to date." If you're not a fan of green, the skin has three colored substyles: Gun Metal Blue Violet Aqua You can grab ...

Alright, yet another poll about the new WinCustomize Live programming we're working on.  Like everything we do here, we want to make sure that we're providing the kind of content that you all most want to see.  This whole live video thing is cool, but if there's nothing going on that you're interested in, there's little reason to tune in.  So this week, I'd like to know what you'd most like to see on the video stream. Watch us work... live. Q&A sessions with site admins/m...

Last week, we talked a bit more about the WinCustomize Live idea, having periodic live, streaming video sessions here on WinCustomize where you'll be able to chat with folks like me, Island Dog and occasionally even Frogboy himself.  We're still in the early stages of planning content for this, we wanted to get a feel for how you all felt about the idea. For the most part, people seem pretty open to the idea, with just about 64% saying they thought it was actually a good idea. ...

Despite issues with the upload system, we managed to pull in some great skins this weekend.  Skins, cursors, gadgets and wallpapers.  Here are my favorites from the last few days. Welcome back to the work week. 

Island Dog is back at it again this week with another installment of "This Week in Skinning" for the week ending today, October 26th.  It was an incredibly busy week for submissions so be prepared to wade through a lot of great skins.  This week, Island Dog has pulled together 2 cursor themes, 2 DesktopX widgets, a Dream, a SoundPackage, a spooky wallpaper and a fall-inspired WindowBlinds skin.  Great stuff as always, so be sure to check out the full list by hitting the lin...

After the incredible success of my call for community Winky submissions, I got to thinking of how maybe our little friend needs a little bit more variety throughout the year.  In the past, I've been told that Winky changed his appearance for some holidays and seasons.  Do you think we should bring back the special Winky graphics for different days and times of the year? Here are some of the variations we were thinking up Thanksgiving Christmas Valentines Day Easter St. P...