Island Dog, who has been turning out some great video demos for people wanting to see what our software looks like in action has gone and made the process of finding one of his videos as easy as possible.  In the past few months he's used a variety of video hosting services, but last week he went the extra mile and built a YouTube channel for all things skinning.  He's placed all of his videos to date in the channel for you to review, and since it's YouTube, you can share your own des...

Yesterday, at the keynote for the Apple World Wide Developer Conference, CEO Steve Jobs announced that the next version of the previously Apple-only web browser, Safari, would be making its way to the Windows world.  In fact, upon the end of the keynote when the newly redesigned Apple.com was launched, you could download a beta of Safari 3.  It looks like Apple is hoping to take the browser world by storm like it did with the music player/store software market with iTunes.  Howev...

Good morning everyone.  After two weeks, it's time to retire our current poll and toss up something new for you to sink your teeth into.  Previously, we asked you how your browsing habits on WinCustomize change during the summer months, as nice weather and vacations whisper their siren song in your ear, trying to lure you away.  I asked this because we know for a fact that when summer comes around, traffic numbers decrease, but what we don't know is if it's a drop in our return u...

Earlier this year, the folks at Ars Technica set about writing up an ultimate gamer box configuration guide, split into three categories by price.  The goal was to give three solid suggestions depending on your budget, to get the best bang for your buck.  In the original guide, the three systems (Budget, Hot Rod and God) were benchmarked against one another using the same games and tools, so you even had a good idea of what you could expect from your power-hungry games.  The down...

This week, the moderation team and site staff put their heads together to talk about user promotions and what names leaped out of people's heads as possible contenders.  So today, after several days of discussion, I'm pleased to announce the following user promotions: Master For his numerous contributions to the skinning world, from msstyles to WindowBlinds skins, as well as his effort to organize other skinners into a new skinning studio (MaxStyles), I'm pleased to promote vStyler t...

It's the end of the week so it's time to do a quick round-up of interesting articles posted to WinCustomize in the past few days.  First, we have This Week in Skinning from Island Dog.  Pickings were slim this week as we move into the summer slowdown, but there were still a few gems to pick out and highlight.  My personal favorite was the Xion skin by I.R. Brainiac. Check it out here . Next is a bonus installment to RomanDA's DesktopX tutorial series.  He said he ...

Digg.com is one of the hot properties in the world of Web 2.0 with it's user-driven news system that attempts to bring the most popular and relevant stories to the top.  In theory, this helps separate the signal from the noise in the world of online news, but the reality doesn't match up very well.  Much of what does make it onto the Digg front page is garbage (there's a Paris Hilton story up right now), but the concept is extremely interesting since it has developed such a ridiculous...

Time for another really cool hardware modification story.  The last one we looked at was a pretty good looking wooden case mod that had a sort of Japanese art style to it.  To me it was probably one of the more elegant modifications I've ever seen.  Today, we head in the other direction, towards something really over-the-top and flashy.  The link was passed to me by ZubaZ this morning and it seemed like a cool mod to share with you folks. The Steampunk LCD Monitor Mod. ...

Today, a little bit of web browser history... It started as NCSA Mosaic, turned itself into Mosaic, then Mosaic Navigator and after some legal fighting, finally settled on Netscape Navigator in 1994 for the 1.0 release.  It shifted to Netscape Communicator at version 4.0 with the addition of mail, newsgroups and a WYSIWYG web page editor and enjoyed that name through 1998 an acquisition by AOL, and a cancelation of development (v5.0 never saw the light of day). In the midst of the 5....

NBC Universal Incorporated has announced plans to make some of its television programming available as widgets that can be added to blogs, personal home pages, wikis and social networking sites.  To accomplish this, NBC will be using tools from Clearspring Technologies Incorporated.  Initially, NBC will be offering content from the shows "Dateline", "Hardball with Chris Matthews" and the "NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams" as well as sports content from the iVillage.com unit. ...

One of the most dreaded words, both in the world of education and of business, is "presentation".  Now, I'm not talking the fear a presenter may feel, having to stand up in front of dozens, if not hundreds fellow students of colleagues, no, that's taken for granted.  I'm talking about the dread feeling in the pit of your stomach when you realize you're about to be subjected to an hour or more of PowerPoint hell.  Despite nearly a decade of use, it seems most presenters haven't th...

Today, in response to popular demand from the skinning community here at WinCustomize, we have launched a gallery dedicated to skinning the media player application, Xion! Xion is a growing favorite in the customization world because of its incredibly simple skinning system.  Here's a bit from the Xion homepage about how skinning works: Xion features a new standard in skin support. Baffled by script syntax? Pulling your hair out over slicing up skin elements? Crying over spilt mi...

On this day, in 1977, The Apple II, considered to be the first real personal computer, went on sale.  With its integrated keyboard, built-in BASIC programming language, color monitor and sound card, it set the standard for what people would expect from a PC in the years to come.  The machine, after officially kicking off the PC craze, went on to dominate the education industry, filling classrooms nation-wide with systems.  A lot of people cut their teeth on an Apple II running L...

Last month, Apple launched a new iTunes service for DRM (Digital Rights Management) free songs.  These songs, which not only lacked copy-protection software to prevent purchasers from easily transferring tracks between computers and digital players, also come encoded at a higher quality.  So not only are you getting a music track that doesn't limit how you use it, it also sounds better.  Win-win, right? Well, evidently not if you're on the extreme side of the anti-DRM debate. ...

Ok, outside of the iPhone release date, the weekend was pretty quiet for tech news.  So today you get a little bit of the weird news I come across in my daily browsing. Sometimes, people just have way too much time on their hands and the results are some fairly strange and interesting projects.  Today, we jump on-board with the ever-growing cat photo craze (if you don't know what I'm talking about, be grateful) by bringing you a link to one of the weirder cat-inspired pages on the ...