As it's Friday, it's time again to hear from our favorite Spokesman of 'The Man', Island Dog! Today it's a double-header of articles highlighting fantastic content that's come out recently here on WinCustomize.  So, if you've been living under a rock, or otherwise ignoring the Newest Skins section on the gallery page, hit up the following stories: The Week in Skinning - September 7th The weekly round-up of what's hot and worth checking out in the community. The Month in Dreams...

The iPhone.  Hailed by Apple fanboys and gizmo geeks as as close to a holy experience as one can achieve with an electronic device, saw a significant price cut this week when Apple announced its new line of iPod devices.  After only 10 weeks on the market, the iPhone dropped from $599 to $399 for the 8GB model, a 33% drop in price, and perhaps the fastest any Apple product has ever dropped.  The price drop was related to the announcement of the iPod Touch, an iPod with all the iP...

After the very positive reaction to Part 1 , today we continue our Developer Interview Series with a chat with the developers behind the skinnable web browser, Maxthon .  A few weeks ago, I had the chance to sit down with Jeff Chen, founder of Maxthon and SiC, the main UI & Experience Designer and tossed out some questions about Maxthon, how it came to be, why they did what they did and where they feel the application is headed in the future.  Hit the link below to read the full...

Oh sweet irony!  Wired is reporting today that Pfizer, the company that makes the ED medication Viagra, has experienced a bit of a computer problem that resulted in Pfizer PCs being used to send out... wait for it... Viagra spam! Now, you might think it's just a marketing effort, but it's not.  Computers inside the company's network were infected with a virus that spams random email addresses with messages trying to sell the staple item of Internet spam.  The virus transformed...

There's been a lot of commotion lately about what sort of legal classification bloggers fall under.  Are they media?  Do they have the same protections as journalists?  Do they have to comply with campaign finance laws when it comes to political blogs?  In the case of the latter, the Federal Election Commission yesterday declared that blogs and bloggers are classified as media for the purposes of US Electoral Law. The ruling came in two parts.  First in a case agains...

Ok, if you watch tech news feeds at all, it's pretty much impossible to miss out on the fact that Microsoft today launched the 1.0 version of Silverlight, their multimedia/web application development platform aimed at taking a chunk of the growing web-based applications market.  The 1.0 release provides support for VC-1, WMV video, WMA and MP3 audio, rich graphics, animation and UI functionality.  To go along with the release of Silverlight 1.0, Microsoft has also put up Expressio...

In the wake of media giants like Warner Music, and NBC leaving iTunes for greener pastures, it looks like Amazon is just about ready to make it's big debut on the online music sales scene later this month.  It's expected that the initial catalog of songs will be over 1 million and include tracks from Universal Music Group, EMI and a number of independent labels.  Sony BMG and Warner Music Group are not expected to be a part of the initial offering. Word is that Amazon is pushing re...

One appliance that just hasn't kept up with the times is the toaster.  Sure, you'd think that there wasn't much you could improve on such a device outside of it having a setting that manages to not reduce a slice of bread to a sheet of charcoal, but you'd be wrong!  In today's high-speed world, where we demand that our gizmos look as good as possible, giving our kitchens that futuristic look we all so desire. To that end, we bring you the Transparent Toaster.  Using two pieces...

It seems like things are less than rosy in the land of iTunes.  Yet another major media content provider, NBC, has decided it does not want to renew its contract with Apple's iTunes service to sell digital content.  It looks like the same issues that caused Universal to walk away earlier this year: price, DRM  and content bundling.  It is currently unclear whether NBC will continue on under the same at-will sales agreement as Universal, or whether it will simply pull all con...

If you're anything of a sci-fi geek, you know that one of the coolest technologies in the imaginary universe is 3D holographic projection.  Displaying a still image or even a video feed in actual 3D, not just 3D projected onto a 2D surface.  We've gotten good at the latter, but the former has until now remained a bit beyond our reach.  Well, researchers at USC have taken a significant leap towards that far-off future that includes ray guns, aliens and giant planet-destroying batt...

At the start of 2007 with the launch of the new WinCustomize, we kicked off something new in the skinning community, an opportunity for some of the most veteran and well-respected members to sell their work directly to users via one of the largest skinning sites on the net. It was our way of giving back to many of the individuals who have helped make WinCustomize what it is today.  We had the infrastructure, and we had the reach to millions of users and felt it was time to show our appr...

This news story goes out to the older generation here at WinCustomize who will actually remember the Time service provided by AT&T.  You see, once upon a time you could pick up your phone, dial a number and be told the time of day where you were.  A seemingly silly thing in this day and age of cell phones, digital watches and other devices that automatically sync their clocks to some far off server.  The service, which has been in operation since the 1920s only remains in operati...

In just about a month, testers will be getting their hands on Service Pack 1, to hopefully find and squash those nasty bugs before the rest of us have to download and install it ourselves.  The pack breaks fixes out into three categories: quality improvements, administrative improvements, and support for emerging technologies and standards.  The first will be most appreciated by the average user, while the last two are more for IT professionals and coders. BetaNews has a preliminar...

Dragon*Con, America's largest gaming/art/all things geeky convention is happening this weekend in Atlanta, Georgia, and if you're going to be attending you'll have a chance to meet Cari Begle (CariElf, Lead Developer) and Paul Boyer (Mormegil, UI, Art & Animation) live and in the flesh!  Both will be in attendance and speaking at several panels again this year, giving you a chance to ask them what its like to work in the games industry, and what it takes to get a job. These are the ...

Read/Write Web, a top site focusing on what's happening in the business of web technology, has a look back at the evolution of the Web Office platform; office productivity tools that are accessible via the web.  They begin their retrospective at Writely, which later became Google Docs.  Writely is widely considered to be the first real web-based office application.  Prior to Writely and it's heavy use of AJAX, web tools weren't even approximating the experience of using a desktop...