Today we have a pair of reflection articles from our friendly neighborhood astro-turfer, Island Dog. First off, there's the This Week in Skinning article, looking at what cool stuff was submitted to the WinCustomize libraries in the past seven days. This week, we have cursor set, DX theme, an animated wallpaper, a WindowBlinds skin and a pair of wallpapers. To see what the picks were for this week, go here . And then there's the Month in Dreams. A video montage with a l...
RomanDA's excellent DesktopX tutorial series has reached its end this week at installment #10: Hide & Seek. Lesson #10, which builds on the nine previous, covers adding in hide/show elements and some fancy effects like sliding menus and graphics to your DX widgets. It's really three smaller tutorials in one, which were wrapped together because they were so closely related. The DesktopX tutorial series is a great example of what folks here can do when they decide to share...
Want to advertise your product or company on the radio? Already using Google AdWords to promote yourself in web ads? Well, after a lot of talk about the idea, AdWords now has the capability to take orders for radio advertising space. Google will even provide professional voice actors to record the spots. What's interesting is that this received no real press or announcement, it just appeared one day in the tab list for Google AdWords. So we've got Google on the ...
Microsoft has been making a big push lately to secure their dominance in the field of small, Internet-based or Internet-enhancing utilities and applications. It started with MSN Messenger oh so long ago and has grown with the recent refocusing on the Windows Live brand, centered largely around the online services at Live.com One of the areas little explored in the online services arena, surprisingly enough, is that of Blogging. On the whole, most blogs require you to travel to a ...
Ok, the results of last week's poll have been previously posted and discussed, so this week we dive straight into the new poll... How Much Time Do You Spent at WinCustomize in the Summer? The summer months are lean months for most websites it seems. For some strange reason people would rather be outside in the sun, having fun, traveling etc than spending their time visiting their favorite web sites and forums. Now, that's mostly the general anonymous browsing crowd, not you,...
In the past year, the idea of multitouch interfaces has spread like wildfire. It started with conference demos of graduate student research projects showing amazing new opportunities in UI and application design when you aren't limited to an artificial pointer, and really hit the mainstream with the unveiling of the iPhone at this year's MacWorld Conference. You even saw a hint of the technology in Bill Gates' CES 2007 keynote speech, with the interactive kitchen countertop. Well...
After the moderator and public voting, we're ready to announce the winner for the ObjectDock Background Contest, sponsored by community member WebGizmos! We had 9 outstanding entries in the contest to pick from and it really came down to the wire with the final moderator vote breaking the tie between our #1 and #2 entries. These are all outstanding docks that everyone who has ObjectDock should take a look at. The 1st place entry and winner of a copy of ObjectDock Plus, and one premi...
Cult-leader Steve Jobs and Destroyer of Competitors Bill Gates, long-time bitter rivals in the PC industry, are going to be doing something very interesting this week. They'll be sharing the stage at the D5 Conference in California to talk about the history and future of the digital revolution. The most interesting part? The session is going to be completely unscripted and led by Wall Street Journal writers Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, the co-producers for the D5 conference....
It's Friday, so that means another tour of what's new and cool in the community with our own professional forum crawler, Island Dog! Like always, he tries to pick out the best of what the community was able to put up in the past week, perhaps exposing you to something new and interesting that you might have missed. This week, we have a cursor pack, a dream animated wallpaper, an icon pack and a WindowBlinds skin. Check it out and share what your picks would have been!
So you're an employee at Microsoft, more specifically the Zune division, the people responsible for Microsoft's entry into the MP3/mobile video player market. You are a good, loyal employee who puts in their hours, does a good job and in general works very hard to help make sure the product is a success. There's only one problem. You own an iPod. You try and disguise your treachery by keeping the device in your pocket as you work through the day, you've even purchased a pair o...
Every day, millions of people turn to Google to find the answers to life's burning questions; What did Paris Hilton do last night? What's the best chili recipe? How much wood, could a woodchuck chuck, if a woodchuck could chuck wood? And so on. So as we query the search engine for these bits of knowledge, we largely do so separated from everyone else on the Internet. The world's largest virtual gathering point essentially treats each user as the only person in the world....
Students at WPI have created a new take on the standard PC mouse with a device they're calling "MagicMouse". The undergraduate student team built a wireless mouse that you wear like a ring, using the natural gestures of your hand to control the cursor on the screen. This little doodad works by using a number of receivers placed around the user that track the motion of the tiny ultrasonic transmitter the user wears on their finger. The super-cool part about this? It's done w...
It's been a few months since it was lasted updated, so this week I went digging around the brains of our developers and consulted the Oracle of Product Releases to try and build a new list of Stardock apps that are currently, or will soon be, Vista-compatible. The full list is linked below, complete with estimated release dates and some additional info on testing status. Below is just a quick-reference chart that covers the high-points without any of the detail IMPORTANT NOTE: LogonStudio V...
About 4 months ago, I posted a small chart detailing several of Stardock's applications, their current status running on Windows Vista, and (if applicable) their targeted "Vista-Ready" date. Since the original list was posted in January, a lot has changed. Some of the original dates came to pass, some didn't, and it's about time we put up a more accurate and up-to-date list for the coming months. Vista Status Vista Version Testing Phase Targeted Be...
Google does a lot of really nifty stuff, from searching websites, to maps, to telephone directories and more. However, there are a lot of nifty little featured buried deep in the search engine that you might not know about. These little tricks help make Google a quick and easy go-to tool for any number of tasks. Lifehack.org has an article up detailing just a few of these little-known secrets. A few examples: Google Search as a Calculator Take notes on websites with...