It seems like every other day there's some new music download service crawling out of the woodwork. Today it's from a few big names in the music and data world; MTV, Real Networks and Verizon Wireless. These media heavyweights are joining forces in an attempt to become the biggest name in the integrated music services arena, looking to take on Apple's iTunes platform. MTV and Real will be creating a spin-off company for this effort called Rhapsody America, run by the man behind t...
WinCustomize , in partnership with Maxthon International Limited is pleased to announce the Maxthon 2 Skin Competition! Starting this week, skinners from all over the globe will be able to design, build and submit their own custom Maxthon 2.0 browser skins to WinCustomize.com to compete for prizes and bragging rights in the skinning community. Maxthon is one of the most customizable web browsers out there and has taken the Chinese market by storm with over 10 million users world-wi...
We skin a lot of things here. We skin the UI, icons, backgrounds, cursors, media players and more. But one thing I bet most of us don't spend much time customizing is our keyboard. Look down at your fingers right now. My bet is you've got a pretty boring beige (or maybe) black keyboard that doesn't come packed with too many features or many options to play with. Well, in a day and age where people are even creating crazy PC mouse mods , the keyboard represents pos...
In recent weeks, there's been growing controversy over companies and government agencies editing wikipedia articles anonymously, usually trying to improve their own articles, or removing information from articles on competitors. Fortunately, Wikipedia at least tracks the IP address of all editors if they're not logged in so if you're feeling diligent enough, you can trace the IP back yourself to who it belongs to. This is time-consuming though and sometimes a bit tricky. To that ...
The buzz has quieted down, and iPhone owners aren't the target of universal envy that they were just a few short weeks ago. So now that the glow has started to fade, reality sets in. While users are still, on the whole, extremely happy with their phones, they're just now getting their first bills from AT&T, and boy are they a shocker! It turns out that even if you have an unlimited data plan, your bill will itemize each bit of data that was received by or sent from your phone.&nb...
According to a study from Glasgow and Paisley universities, e-mail is the cause for many productivity lapses and work stress. Three researchers monitored 177 employees to see how they react to the never-ending stream of email most of us are subjected to on a daily basis. The results? Over a third of the participants reported stress over the obligation to quickly respond to incoming mail. Another 28 percent said it was the volume of mail that caused them stress. Odd...
Welcome back skinners, customizers and general tech gear-heads. Though it's a day late, I'm here with the poll results from last week, and a completely new poll for this week. Last week, we wanted your feedback on the WindowBlinds 6 beta to get a general feel for how the community received the early version of the next generation of WindowBlinds. On the whole your responses were very positive, with only a small portion of you expressing disappointment or out-right hatred.&...
Ever wonder what technology goes in to powering your favorite site? Ever wonder how many other sites out there use similar tech? Sometimes it's easy to figure out by looking at file names or header information, sometimes it's a little more difficult and you have to dig through source code to discover what makes a site tick. To answer these burning questions, a pretty nifty website has cropped up that will automatically analyze any site you feed it, break it out into a bunch of...
Last week, rumors began to circle that beta copies of Windows Vista Service Pack 1 were seen "in the wild", that a member of the still small test community had leaked the code to the wider Internet. As time went on, the rumor gained credibility and now there are several major IT sites confirming its availability and some have even taken it upon themselves to pick apart what exactly is in this early service pack and post their thoughts. APC Magazine is just one such outfit posting its "...
It's Friday at long last, and to wrap up our weekly coverage, we have Island "Spreader of FUD" Dog and his regular "This Week in Skinning" feature. This week has a fair bit of variety for everyone to choose from. There are two new WindowBlinds skins, two icon sets from last year's GUI Championships, a wallpaper, two DX widgets and a dock. How do you think ID did with this week's picks? Agree? Disagree? Have your own favorites you want to share? Head on ove...
As Apple gains in popularity, and as nerds the world over grow tired of the same old arguments, the whole Mac v PC debate has grown kind of quiet in recent months. It's almost as if both camps have agreed to live in peace (or at least a cease-fire) with one another. Well, we can't let that happen! To help keep the bad blood flowing, Computerworld writer Scot Finnie has a two-part series on Mac v PC cost analysis. In the first part he talked solely about hardware. T...
There's been a lot of attention paid lately to how long search engines, specifically Google, retain personal information on people who use its services. Privacy nuts have been getting increasingly nervous about the power a handful of companies have to gather and sort personal data. To answer this growing fear, a website has appeared, aptly named "Googlonymous" it allows you to feed search terms into Google without giving them your data. The service goes out, does the search for y...
In an economy focusing so heavily on tools to put the power of content creation in the hands of regular every-day people, one area that has been surprisingly underserved is that of book self-publishing. Up until today, if you wanted to write a book, or make a movie and then have it semi-professionally printed/bound/packaged your only real option was a service called Lulu.com, which let users upload their content, format it, choose bindings and cover art etc and walk away with a very good ...
The "social web" fad continues with seemingly a new networking site popping up every other day, each offering it's own take on how to connect you to your friends and colleagues. Today, a new site joins the list; Spock. Spock is a little different from most social sites though. Instead of forming communities like MySpace or Facebook, it's a people indexer and relationship mapping tool like LinkedIn. Spock scours the web for mentions of full names, and works to match a...
While Service Pack 1 looms somewhere in the far-off distance, Microsoft is keeping busy with patches and fixes for Windows Vista. Today, they officially announced the availability of what many consider to be the first stages of what will eventually be SP1; the "performance and reliability" and "compatibility and reliability" patches. They currently don't show up as an option in Windows Update and have to be downloaded manually, but that is likely to change come the next Patch Tuesda...