Earlier this year, we launched a gallery for Xion, an incredibly easy to skin media player from r2 studios.  We added the gallery at the request of several skinners in the community.  The deal when we added it though was that I had to have at least 10 skins ready to go into the gallery as soon as I launched it, as a sign of popularity and that the skinners who were requesting it really wanted it.  Honestly, I expected maybe a few dozen skins then it would slow down, but just the o...

Sometimes there are folks in the community that don't turn out the high-profile items like WindowBlinds skins, or Icon Packages, so you might not necessarily have spotted them.  But just because you don't know they're there, doesn't mean they're not incredibly valuable to the community through their contributions. Master Apprentice sViz is one of those you may not yet know, but she's someone you should definitely take note of.  A member here for about a year and a half, she has jump...

This month we unleashed WindowBlinds 6.0 to some pretty positive press and overall approval from the community.  As reviews come in for the newest version, it's interesting to look back in time to see what versions of WindowBlinds long past got for review scores. BX dug up a review for WindowBlinds 0.95 on ActiveWin.com.  The review, while brief, talks about improvements since 0.90, the addition of a config tool, and is just loaded with screenshots of this pre-1.0 version.  Hi...

  What you're looking at is a live video stream of my desk here at Stardock World HQ.  We're playing around with some ideas on video content, and this is our live feed experiment.  Since the project is under my umbrella, the test gets done at my desk.   I had the camera pointed at DoctorNick earlier, but he didn't like that.  So for now you get to look at my white board, my Geek Action Figure, and my telephone.  I may write messages on the board for people pe...

We're only two weeks away from Halloween now, and to get everyone fully in the spooky mood, Island Dog has dug through the galleries to find the best Halloween content we have to offer on WinCustomize.  Hit the link below for the full, massive list of ghoulish skins ready to haunt your desktop. Home Sweet Home vStyler

Wallpapers are an often overlooked piece of the user experience, as they're often covered by application windows, folders and icons.  But there's something to be said about finding the wallpaper that perfectly matches your skin and icon set, making for the ultimate theme. Here at WinCustomize, we have a wallpaper gallery with thousands of wallpapers submitted over the years, some of them are absolutely fantastic too. But we know we're not THE destination on the net for wallpapers, t...

Yesterday, the particularly observant among you will have noticed that ObjectBar was updated to version 2.1.  Overall, the update brought about a number of Vista and WindowBlinds fixes, plus support for Vista 64-bit.  If you're a fan of this extremely useful toolbar application, hit up Stardock Central for the update. Here are a few of the major updates: Fixed issue with Virtual Desktops snap-in not updating replicas (required Virtual Desktops update) Improved "show real ...

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...

A page that was pretty popular on the previous WinCustomize design that got a bit lost in the shuffle for WC2k7 was the Community Links page.  There we listed all sorts of sites in the skinning community with logos and brief descriptions of what they were about.  In its day, it was probably the most comprehensive list of skinning sites on the net.  Unfortunately, something bad happened.  At one point in the past few months, the list of sites went MIA.  We're not sure ...

Ok, so you've skinned your Windows UI, added a funky wallpaper, switched out your icons, and tossed a few gadgets around your desktop.  Your UI is fully customized.  Well, almost fully.  Chances are you still have that regular, boring windows cursor on your screen.  If that's the case, go grab yourself a copy of CursorXP and check out some of these killer cursor themes. In my opinion, these are some of the finest cursors done all year. ...

Sure WindowBlinds 6 is the coolest thing since sliced bread, we all know that.  But how does it compare to skins of days long past?  How do skins today stack up against the first WB skins from waaay back in the 1990s?  Well, I was curious and decided to dig into the earliest parts of the WindowBlinds galleries where we have skins back from before the site actually existed (archived from other sites now gone).  It's amazing to see how far we've come now in just under a decade...

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...

In the past, we offered the community a CD copy of some of the best conten t on WinCustomize for a given year.  The last time we did this was in the spring of 2005, offering up skins from January 1 to March 31.  So, it's been two years now since you could get all of your skin needs on a single disk, and we're looking at whether or not there would be demand for a return to the annual CD compilations.  Of course, now with Dreams and Icon Packages that are 10-20 megabytes each, we'...

Last week we asked you what your thoughts were on us doing more special suites like R.I.P 2007 as bonuses for subscribers or those who purchase specific products.  Overall, the response to RIP 2007 and the free Dream animated wallpaper has been outstanding.  While comments on a forum are nice and helpful, sometimes it helps to have some numbers to back things up.  So last week's poll asked for your thoughts on the suite and whether we should do more like it. Here's the pretty ...

Community Skin Project #2 is coming along nicely.  theAVMAN has marshaled together skinners to make a Halloween themed set of skins and this weekend released the core piece, the WindowBlinds skin.  Fittingly titled "Next of Skin", it's a great skin for those looking to get into the spooky holiday spirit Now, to go along with the release of the skin, there's a contest that could net you a free premium skin of your choice.  Here's how it works: Download & Run Ne...