Last year there was a brief attempt at featuring one skinner every month with a brief interview and a mini-tutorial written by the featured community member. In theory this was a great idea, and the community seemed to genuinely enjoy it. In practice it was more difficult than I originally anticipated. Instead of completely abandoning the idea, since I very much like being able to spotlight great members of the community, the feature is moving to a quarterly basis, basically following the seaso...
Today, a bit of humor to start things off. Most of the folks here are of a technical mindset. We're good with computers, many of us making our living off of them. Of course, with that knowledge comes a price. At one point in an IT career, you will likely have spent some time working tech support, answering calls and emails from people who are still struggling with the concept of electricity and indoor plumbing. If you managed to skip this oh-so-wonderful wrung in t...
To kick off our recently revived "Featured Skinner" series, we've sat down with well-known member of the skinning community, vStyler, to ask him a few quick questions about his thoughts on skinning, how he got started, and a little bit about his skinning studio, MaxStyles, which has recruited community members such as I.R. Brainiac, messiah1, J. Aroche and others. I'd like to thank vStyler for taking the time to answer these questions in such depth and for providing a great preview shot of h...
Welcome back skinning fans to another fun-filled and exciting week here at WinCustomize.com! Last week we delved the mysteries of the collective community's brain to try and find out what the most popular overall style of skin is. Despite providing the nebulous "other" option to cover everything I forgot to list out, one style came out on-top by a large margin. It would seem that on the whole, you folks are most into the "Bright & Clean" style of skin. Here's a full brea...
You have unions in a lot of industries nowadays; automobile manufacturing, resource mining, airline staffing etc. However, unions are something that have been slow to expand into more white-collar fields such as information technology. A few years ago a push began to unionize IT operations roles, and other tasks that can require long hours for no additional pay or compensation. The latest group to the "We should unionize!" party though is a little out of the ordinary. Pe...
Once more this week we turn to intrepid "Capitalist Marketing Pig", Island Dog, for our weekly round up of what's new and hot in the world of WinCustomize submissions this week. While it's summer and things are slow, there's still some great content to check out. This week we have two cursor sets, a pack of ObjectDock icons, a wallpaper, a revived WindowBlinds skin and a skin for the Xion media player. If you've been away this week and don't feel like digging through the gallerie...
When dealing with any piece of electronics, or any mechanical doodad that malfunctions, someone will usually pipe up and say "They don't make 'em like they used to!" While that's usually a load of bull as people often remember things better than they were, sometimes you run across a device that proves that statement true. In this case it's a 1989 Macintosh mouse connected to a still-functioning Maintosh IIci which put in 18 mighty years of service before going off to that big electr...
Back in the late 90s, when everyone was going crazy with Internet-based services and business ventures that made absolutely no sense, there was a company called Webvan, whose entire deal was they would do the grocery shopping for you and deliver it to your door for a fee (of course, assuming you lived in specific areas). Needless to say, this company took a nose-dive and the seemingly useless service of Internet grocery shopping went the way of the dodo. Well, it seems that Amazon d...
When you're King of the Hill, everyone wants to topple you and take your place, that's just the danger of being the market leader. For a few years now, companies keep popping up aiming to be a "Google Killer" and wrestle away the top dog spot, and sleep on huge piles of money. Well, the latest guy aiming to take on The Big G is Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. In addition to founding Wikipedia, a user-editable encyclopedia that has exploded in popularity in the last few years, W...
July has come and gone, and resident spam bot Island Dog has put together yet another monthly round-up video of some of the best dreams of July. Since summer is kind of sluggish for us, the list is shorter than it would normally be, but there are still a few gems to be had. My personal favorite is the Super Mario Brothers 3 dream. Nothing like watching a little red-suited plumber stomping goombas and koopa troopas! Click the link below to see the full video.
The year is 1978, the ARPAnet connects research institutions and government think tanks across the country. These are the early days of the Internet, when things were pure and clean, and unsullied by the garbage we dig through today in our daily use. It was in the spring of that year though that the slow downward spiral began. The first spam email. Looking back, we can blame the start of spam on one man at once company, Gary Thuerk at the Digital Equipment Corporation in Ma...
If you have to do a lot of writing for your job (and who doesn't these days?) chances are you spend a good portion of your life staring at Microsoft Office. MS Office is pretty much the gold-standard these days for word processors, though it carries with it a pretty hefty price tag. The cheapest version, Office Home & Student 2007, goes for $150 USD at most retailers, which is no small chunk of change to most households on a budget. As a result, an increasing number of users a...
The big news sweeping the tech world yesterday was the discovery of a package of patches released to testers that aims to fix many of the performance and reliability problems that have plagued many Vista users since the OS release in January. While not available through Windows Update yet, details have emerged as to what specifically is being fixed with the patch set, and for the most part it looks like the big winners this time will be gamers and users who push a lot of multimedia on the...
Welcome back Skinning Fans to yet another week of icons, wallpapers, animated desktops and lively forum debate. To kick the week off right, it's time for yet another poll. Yes, yes, I know, you're wondering to yourself what deep and insightful question I could possibly ask this week. Well, after much debate, and several extremely unhelpful suggestions from the peanut gallery (Favorite Way to Skin a Cat just didn't seem like a good idea), a good one was suggested by our game de...
For years now, noted PC technology columnist John Dvorak has had nothing but pure disdain for the Macintosh platform, and Apple in general. He didn't like the idea of the OS, the entire philosophy behind the design, and don't get him started on the one-button mouse. Dvorak has made a bit of a career out of antagonizing particularly fanatical portions of the computing universe (he likes to poke at Linux users a lot too), but finally decided to quit his complaining and actually USE a ...