UPDATE:   If you can't make it to the developer chat but still want a shot at having your questions asked, you can sign on to our IRC chat and join #chatquestions early.  Just ask your question in the channel and I'll log it, and add it to the potential list for the dev chat Wednesday night! This Wednesday, February 7th at 4pm PST / 7pm EST / midnight GMT we will be hosting a developer chat to answer questions about the upcoming release of Galactic Civilizations II: Dark Avata...

In a world where Google dominates the online landscape, and often a company's fortunes rise and fall along with their Google PageRank, it's no surprise that newspapers, often slow to catch up to the advance of technology, are finding that their favorite, catchy headlines, make it impossible for readers to find their stories through popular search engines.  The witty taglines that are interesting to read and chuckle at over your morning coffee don't perform well when users search by descript...

Seems that the much-touted Family Pack discount program for copies of Windows Vista Home Premium got off to a rocky start.  Early adopters who went in for the discount in the first few days of Vista's availability received keys that didn't work with Windows Vista.  Microsoft said they were in fact valid keys, but just for some other product they refused to identify. Today Microsoft said they were in the process of issuing new keys to anyone who might have received an incorrect key ...

Sometimes, bugs are just too funny to not talk about.  Of course we expected a fair share of gotchas with Vista that would have slipped through testing, and this is one I can't imagine anyone in QA would have thought to build a test case for.  Turns out, if you have speech recognition turned on in Vista, and are using speakers instead of a headset, the possibility exists for someone to play an audio file on your computer that will cause your computer to run unauthorized tasks. Grant...

So the game is "Gold" and your mouse finger is getting that galactic genocidal twitch again.  You want to subjugate races, forge treaties, establish your trade empire and deploy your newly designed "Vicious Knid" Class destroyer against your opponents.  Alas, you'll have to wait a bit longer before satisfying your inner megalomaniac, and for the time being draw your Galactic Civilizations sustenance from these two succulent previews from GameShark and GamingNexus . Tyler Sager took...

Time to retire the current poll asking for feedback on the new WinCustomize.com.  In the two weeks we ran the poll, 1,024 votes were cast, making it one of our more successful polls to date.  We were looking for the general reaction to the new site design and here's the general gist of things: Fully 58% of you either loved it or really liked it. About 16.8% of you are OK with the site. 5.96% are simply indifferent. And we've inflicted emotional pain and suffering upon a whopping ...

The Zune Digital Music Player is Microsoft's bid to unseat the Apple iPod as the dominant device in the portable music player market.  It launched late last year and managed to capture 10.2% of the hard drive based player market in that short time, but has been a target of technical criticism and has failed to spark the sort of cult-like following Apple has with its iPod. The leader of that group at Microsoft, Bryan Lee, has announced plans to leave the company soon to pursue other inte...

A lot of you have been asking in the forums and on IRC what the current status is on various Stardock applications and their path to being "Vista Ready."  Well, you've already seen Brad's roadmap, which outlines some of the cooler things we have going forward, but I thought it would be helpful for everyone to have a more to-the-point chart with current status, and some vague target dates.  This is a peek at what we're aiming for in the first half of 2007.  Remember this is just a...

  NOTICE: THIS POST IS NO LONGER CURRENT.   With the launch of Windows Vista this week, questions are coming up regarding our plans to update our software to support the new operating system.  You've already seen Brad's article on our product roadmap where he discusses programs such as LogonStudio Vista and the new versions of IconPackager, WindowBlinds and DesktopX. The article is a great look at what we've got cooking for the next few months. However, people have ...

Windows Vista marks a new era in desktop customization.  Last week we launched a gallery for LogonStudio Vista, and we've been hard at work with WindowBlinds 5.5 and a version of IconPackager that will allow you to keep your favorite icons and skins when you make the leap and upgrade.  But there's one aspect of customizing Vista that comes built-in; Sidebar Gadgets. Today we've opened up the Sidebar Gadget Gallery here at WinCustomize.  In order to give the gallery the ...

January 30th, the day set by Microsoft for the consumer release of Windows Vista is already upon us... depending on where you live.  If you live in New Zealand, you were in the first market to be able to walk to a store and purchase yourself a copy of the new operating system.  A few hours behind the New Zealanders, comes our friends down under in Australia, and then almost a full day later, those of us in North America will get our chance. GeekZone has the story of the New Zeal...

Last week was a good week if you're a Galactic Civilizations II fan eagerly awaiting the release of Dark Avatar.  Two great previews went up that are packed with a lot of information. The first comes from 1UP.Com, posted last Wednesday.  Writer Mike Nelson took a crack at the latest beta build and is personally comforted by the Drengin's continued dominance in the interstellar culinary field.  But Drengin Fire Chili aside, Mike took some time to look closely at some of the new ...

Windows Vista releases to the public next week, and a lot of us here in the skinning community are trying to get a grasp on what that's going to mean for us.  What are the technical hurdles?  Have certain aspects of the UI been locked away?  What are the changes?  There are a lot of questions floating around out there right now and most of us don't have a whole lot of answers. To address this and hopefully spark more discussion, Brad Wardell has posted a 10-point article ...

Today a little bit of news from the "WTF?" category.  A lot of us here at Stardock are caffeine junkies of one persuasion or another.  We take our energy-jolting beverages very seriously here and have a ready supply of cola and an excellent selection of coffee to jump start us in the morning and keep us going far into the day.  Of course, we're not addicted or anything, it's not like our very existence is maintained through these stimulating supplements.  So given our hea...

Here at WinCustomize, we rely heavily on Google's AdSense program to help support the site and offset costs.  They do much better than the older style of ads which were image or animation based pieces that were distributed to a wide variety of sites, with no concern for site content.  Google ads take content off the page to figure out the most relevant advertisements to display.  The results are advertisements that might actually be worthwhile to users who view the site.  The...