So you've skinned your desktop, your laptop, bought the customized faceplates for your cell phone, you even have decals stuck to your PC case.  I bet you had some fancy work done to your car to make it stand-out more .  You're a customization junkie and you just can't get enough of it! Unfortunately, that Windows Mobile device of yours, while it may be skinned on the outside, probably has that boring default look that Palm/HP/Dell/Acer etc. stick you with.  O...

Ever wonder what the folks who keep the site running think about what's being submitted?  Every day, our team of volunteers sift through the sea of user-submitted content, flagging skins to be featured, assigning ratings and helping control the flow of skins, icons and more to the site.  These people have seen it all.  So, for those who've seen everything, what actually manages to impress them?  This month we bring back the Moderator's Pick feature from late last year.  ...

Friday through Sunday tends to be our peak time for activity during the week both in terms of visitors and in terms of skins submitted.  This past weekend was no exception.  In case you were like me this weekend and off somewhere else for a few days and missed out, here are a few of the really sweet skins that came in this past weekend. THEGLOVEBOX REDStyler Crypto LightStar Po OD Icons By Request Po' Smedley ...

Wow, it's been an incredibly busy week here on WinCustomize!  A great change from the sluggishness of summer as everyone's back at their PCs, turning out skins, writing on the forums, and just generally becoming more active in the community again.  Island Dog and I have been pretty busy too making sure there's new and interesting content both here on the front page and in the articles section.  Here is a summary of some of the big things going on, on WinCustomize this week: A...

We wrap up our WinCustomize Wiki Week with a page that everyone who wants to help out should check: The Work In Progress page.  When you create an article, you can flag it as an incomplete page that needs more attention and assistance (a work-in-progress).  These articles will be listed on the WiP page for everyone to see.  This makes it much easier to quickly find out what needs some tender, loving care.  You know any page on that list has people waiting eagerly for.&...

Every month, there's a thread to the forums asking for everyone to show off their current desktop shots.  This is a great thread to check out every month if you really want to see what people are actually using on their desktops from day to day.  There are some fantastic shots.  Here are a few of my personal favorites.  Of them, Iron Man is my top pick If you want to see these screenshots in their full-sized glory, and see some of the others peo...

If you're anything like me, you have a less than perfect memory, and it only gets worse when you are faced with a barrage of things to do, fix, test, submit etc.  The problem is, it really turns into a self-sustaining issue because the more you get tossed at you, the more you can forget to end up doing.  The result?  A very long day, many hours worked, but then as soon as you get home you realize that you actually forgot to do a whole bunch of stuff so you end up working for anoth...

Day 4, and the Wiki week draws close to its end.  So far this week we've focused heavily on tutorials on the WC Wiki, and that's because that sort of user content is the site's greatest strength.  Tutorials transform a piece of software from some intimidating and obtuse application to a tool that someone can use to create great content.  The best tutorials tend to come from users who know the applications best and use them on a near daily basis.  That's why SK Originals and ...

Welcome To the Sins of a Solar Empire Developer Journals Forum. In the coming months, the team at Ironclad games will be posting periodic developer journals, talking about what goes into making a game like Sins of a Solar Empire.  Hopefully these journals will give you better insight into how certain decisions were made and answer questions you may have about the game. This forum is restricted so that only Ironclad or Stardock employees can create threads.  However, anyone c...

Sure the front page of WinCustomize is dominated by folks like myself, Frogboy and Island Dog, but there's a whole world behind the curtain that's filled with activity and discussion.  Unless you were watching the Recent Forum Activity box like a hawk, there's a chance you might have missed out on some of the most popular discussion topics currently going in our forums.  Here are a few I picked out as being some of the most popular discussions from the last few days: female skinn...

Yesterday, I spent some time sharing with you the #6 through #10 skinners on WinCustomize in terms of most downloads over the last 30 days.  The reason I did 6-10 was because I thought the Gallery page listed the top 5 skinners.  I was wrong, it only lists the top 4.  So I accidentally left off one of our most popular skinners currently active on the site: Night Train .  With 50,142 downloads, he trails J. Aroche at #4 by less than 5,000 downloads, which isn't much conside...

Yesterday I talked about the WindowBlinds tutorials by SK Originals and held them up as a great example of how to write help content for the Wiki.  But that tutorial is for the visual artist.  What if you're a code monkey trying to make a desktop gadget?  Sure there's art involved, but there's a lot of coding too, and that takes a completely different sort of tutorial.  Pictures illustrating steps help, but they're not the whole story.  You need code examples, and writi...

If you look over at the Gallery page, you'll see a list of the 5 most popular skinners on the site over the last 30 days.  These are folks who consistently turn out fantastic work and get a lot of attention.  They're also usually the same handful of people every month.  However, what you may not know is that we have a much more detailed list of top skinners, which list out a lot more folks and you can sort by library and time period, so you can see the top WindowBlinds skinners o...

Yesterday, Microsoft released Windows DreamScene for Vista Ultimate users.  Stardock extended the DreamScene feature set with DeskScapes, which allows for author credits & information, as well as dynamic content as opposed to pre-rendered video.  Since the launch of DeskScapes and DreamScene, the community has been having a great time creating interesting Dream content and submitting it to WinCustomize.  Here are a few of the more recent community submissions that really stand-out...

There's no doubt that 2007 has been a good year for Galactic Civilizations fans.  In February we released the Dark Avatar expansion pack, and have completed several major game improving patches.  We top the year off with the upcoming release of our second expansion pack: Twilight of the Arnor.  Eager to learn more about the soon-to-be-released expansion, GameSpy strategy games guru Allen 'Delsyn' Rausch sat down with Brad Wardell to try and glean a few more tidbits of information...