Remember, the deadline for the Maxthon 2.0 Skinning Contest is just two and a half weeks away.  If you've been holding off starting your skin, I'd suggest getting started very soon.  If you've been holding off uploading your masterpiece, don't wait too long! Just as a reminder of what's on the line Canon SD800 Digital Camera Apple iPod Nano Wacom Digital Tablet I know a few of you have been bemoaning the lack of a graphics tablet lately.  Now's your chance to snag a fr...

As another week draws to a close, Island Dog takes a look at what new skins have been uploaded over the last seven days.  This week was a pretty good week overall with a strong, varied selection from a lot of galleries. This week, we feature wallpapers by kenwas and vStyler, a skin from Essorant, and a dock background from WebGizmos, and more. Hit the link below to see what was cool this week.

Following up yesterday's announcement that Nuage Redux and Optix were WindowBlinds 6 and Vista-ready, Master Skinner Z71 opened up his Stingray skin and freshened it up a bit too.  If you already purchased Stingray, you can download the latest version now.  If you've been holding off, waiting for WindowBlinds 6 compatibility, now's your chance to grab it.

People are asking more and more about when they'll see more skins supporting WindowBlinds 6 and Vista specific features.  Last week, we added a filter to the WindowBlinds gallery so you could quickly find skins that were optimized for WB6, Vista or both, making life easier when someone would ask in the forums about such skins. Today, we have two major skins that have been updated to work fully with WindowBlinds 6 and Windows Vista: Nuage Redux by Essorant, and Optix by MikeB314. ...

As activity in the community picks up again for the fall, we've gone digging through the user list for a handful of folks that caught our attention and that we feel should be promoted.  This is something we're working to do on a much more regular basis. These users were nominated and voted on by the community team (skin & forum moderators, site administrators).  I hope everyone will take a moment to congratulate the following users on their promotion Promoted to Apprentice: ...

WindowBlinds 6 introduces a completely new User Interface for managing and tweaking your skins.  We put a lot of effort into making the application both more attractive and easier to use.  Of course, whenever an application gets a new look and design, people can become lost.  And new users need a bit of guidance, no matter how easy the new UI is to use. Well, our friendly neighborhood evangelist, Island "Spread the Word" Dog has stepped up to put together a quick walkthrough o...

Up at the top of the page, you can see the top 3 skins for the last 24 hours.  As I write this, it's BluNite by Z71 , Aluminium Icons by RickyXu and MMR by Z71 , two great skins and a killer icon package.  There's no question why these are the 3 most popular items at the moment.  But, how many of you click on "Today's Favorites" to see the entire list of 50 skins?  Yes, we actually list out the top 50 skins on the site from the last 24 hours.  So here are #4 - #9 on ...

One of the oldest (and still actively developed) audio players is celebrating its 10th birthday today with the launch of a new version.  Winamp 5.5 left beta and was declared "final" by the guys over at Nullsoft today.  This new version though isn't just a quick rinse and polish of the last stable version, 5.5 sees Winamp really make a play at the centralized media center application market.  They've taken a lot of the disparate services associated with Winamp and consolidated th...

Every day.  Day-in and day-out I see the same smiling lizard staring at me, giving me that thumbs up and leaning casually against something.  He's at the top of the page, he's in my news posts, he's everwhere!  He's driving me mad! Here's what I want.  I need some more variations of Winky to use in news posts and articles here on WinCustomize.  You've seen a few variations here and there such as Winky Wearing Headphones , Winky Holding Court , or Winky Wins a Meda...

WinCustomize has 50 active galleries at this very moment, that's a lot for anyone to sift through, and lately it's been growing at a healthy rate.  I wouldn't be surprised if many users didn't even know some of these galleries existed.  We cover customization components from forum avatars to animated desktops , and pretty much everything in between.  So, in an attempt to help you find what you're looking for, every week for the next few months I will be featuring one WinCustom...

In case you missed it the other week, community member ZubaZ is taking the initiative and starting his own Master Skinner interview series and is seeking your questions.  So if you've ever had a burning question you'd like to have one of our Master Skinners answer, now is your chance.  Just head to the link below, and post your questions for ZubaZ to collect.  The more questions he gets, the better these interviews will be, so get cracking!

SoundPackager is one of those applications that people have seemingly been talking about for ages, always wondering when it would finally materialize.  Well, last month we finally pushed a beta of SoundPackager out the door and testing/tweaking began in earnest.  To go along with this, we launched a new gallery at WinCustomize just for SoundPackager files (.soundpackage).   The entire idea behind SoundPackager is that if you wanted to customize your Windows sounds previo...

Animated Wallpapers are a big part of the Windows Vista Ultimate Extras package, a bit of visual bling that can really show off your new PC and new OS.  Made possible by Windows DreamScene, Stardock took the whole thing a step further with DeskScapes, software that lets artists package up their video creations into easily redistributable files that let them retain complete credit and control.  DeskScapes also lets us build fully dynamic wallpapers that render cool effects in real-time...

Last week, Stardock released WindowBlinds 6.  In addition, there's the impending release of SkinStudio 6.  So there are a lot of changes happening in the world of Windows skinning.  WindowBlinds and Windows Vista are opening doors to new skinning possibilities.  In fact, we have skinners now specifically targeting the new capabilities of WindowBlinds 6 and Windows Vista when creating skins.  Unfortunately, until now there wasn't an easy way to find those skins. Skinn...

At the end of last week, we announced that if you were either a WinCustomize Subscriber , or if you bought a Premium Suite between now and October 31st, you would get R.I.P 2007 , a major update to the suite for WindowBlinds 6 and Windows Vista.  We also released a completely free Dream animated wallpaper to match the suite.  Overall, the response has been great! This week's question is: Would you like to see more promotional suites like R.I.P 2007? Expect the results...