It's been a busy few days in terms of quality articles being written by the community. Here are a few of the top articles I think everyone should take a look at: Learning DX Step-By-Step #8 - Tool-tip Replacement RomanDA continues the DesktopX Tutorial series this week with installment #8; how to do tool-tip replacement in your gadgets. One of the greatest criticisms of our products is the lack of good documentation and tutorials. Well, RomanDA is stepping up to fi...
WinCustomize 2007 was mostly about building a more robust and stable foundation to handle our ever-increasing traffic and site complexity, with that accomplished we're setting our sights on 2008. The WinCustomize 2008 project is heavily focused on improving the user experience of submitting, browsing and downloading skins. We have spent the past several weeks internally picking over what we do and don't like about how the site works, and what we'd like to see improved. As we w...
Summary of last week's poll is going to be short since this week's has a long explanation. I asked what sort of news you most enjoy seeing on the WinCustomize every day. The goal was to find what everyone enjoys the most and try to deliver more of that, making the site a more worthwhile destination during your daily travels. What sort of news would you like to see on WinCustomize General Tech News 49.47% Internet News 12.63% Company-Specific News 7.37% ...
Microsoft Office 2007 decided it had enough of that old menu system that users had come to know, and if not love, at least become acclimated to, over the past decade or more. In place of such classics as "File", "Edit", "View, and the always popular "Help", it organized features in something called the "ribbon". The idea was to organize features in an easy to access way, with everything grouped with common tasks. Of course, Microsoft being Microsoft didn't just add a new UI met...
Time again for Island Dog's weekly article, This Week in Skinning! Every week, Island Dog scours the community for interesting and different skins to feature. Usually they're items you may not have run across in your daily browsing that warrant further attention. This week's installment runs the full range pretty much. We've got a cursor pack, some icons, a wallpaper and even a Right Click skin! Head on over to the article to see what was picked for the week ending...
In the near-constant battle over music piracy, digital rights management, and the push to move the music industry as a whole online, people forget what was one of the original battles over intellectual property, music and the Internet; song lyrics. While there are a great many sites on the net which boast huge libraries of songs, none of them are officially licensed to republish those lyrics. In the early days of the Internet, when a MIDI file was considered the cutting edge of onli...
Admit it, you're a digital pack rat. You have backup CDs and DVDs strewn about, several external hard drives of varying age and size, and probably a flash thumb drive or three when you need to move files around. You never seem to have enough space for your entire collection of rare South American butterfly photos and videos. You've considered those external storage boxes that you slap a few off-the-shelf hard drives into. But those can be costly before you even buy the f...
I want everyone to take a moment and reflect back on the year 1985. A year after the launch of the first Macintosh, and the year that Commodore launched the Amiga 1000 personal computer. During its lifetime, the Amiga series of machines were relatively popular and were used in a wide variety of different industries (they still run some of the sound systems at amusement parks such as Universal Studios and Disney World). Since the demise of Commodore in 1994, the Amiga brand has...
Today there are two community articles I'd like to point everyone towards. The first is directly related to this week's poll summary about the Stardock Internet Chat server. In the news article I linked to a tutorial by IslandDog for using Stardock Central to connect, and left off with a note for the more experienced users to just pick their client of choice and point to our chat server. Well, that gap I left, not providing an explanation for non SDC users who want to come cha...
Time for another poll. Recently I asked who all frequented our Internet Relay Chat server to pick the brains of fellow community members and Stardock employees in real-time. Here's a quick run-down of the results: While a handful of you are regulars in #stardock or #wincustomize, it seems the majority of you either rarely stop by, or simply aren't aware that the chat server exists period (the single most popular answer). For those of you who weren't aware of it, and wo...
For the past several years, a fad has been steadily growing among computer enthusiasts with lots of free time, and really expensive tools; case modding. Normally, your computer case is just some non-descript plastic box that you shove under your desk, or behind your monitor, anywhere to get it out of the way and out of sight. Well, we here all know that just because something is boring or ugly, doesn't mean it necessarily has to stay that way (Luna... need I say more?), and it turns ...
Already working to compete with Apple on the downloadable movie front, Amazon.com is looking to take on the digital music giant with a new service that will sell DRM-free. The new store is supposed to launch this May, and Amazon has spent a considerable amount of time in the past few weeks talking to music labels in an attempt to get them on-board with the new service. This however isn't a new initiative for the online retailer, as they've been working diligently for the last 18 mon...
Today, we raised four WinCustomize Journeymen to the rank of "Master" in recognition of their contributions to the site and community at large. These four have been a great asset to the community through the skins they've contributed, and their interaction with the community via comments on skins and in the forums. They've all been around the block, and are likely very familiar names to most who have spent any time around the community. Our newest Master Skinners are: I.R. Brainiac ...
IconPackager 3.2 (currently in beta) brings the world of icon customization to Windows Vista users, with support for new features such as Live Icons and the many new icons that need to be skinned in the new OS. To help bring awareness to IconPackager and its Windows Vista capabilities, we've written two informational articles detailing both what's new in the world of icons under Windows Vista, and how you go about changing your Vista icons using Stardock IconPackager. The first article...
Microsoft has really jumped into the whole Web 2.0 thing with both feet this week with the launch of a new social bookmarking service, currently in beta, called Tagspace. The idea is to create a central, massive set of bookmarks. Users can add links to the service, and with each link toss in a few descriptive "tags" to help classify and sort what the link is about, in theory letting you group it with similar links, making it easier to find information. The service has two views...