With the impending full launch of Impulse, we've been having some fun with Impulse-related skins.  Yesterday, Seabass posted an Impulse themed cursor set he's been working on in his spare time (yes, in addition to providing fine technical support, he also does 3d art and animation). The Impulse cursor set is built for CursorFX and is packed with animations.  If you watch the ball closely, you'll see that the core shown through the lightning bolt cut-out is constantly in motion. ...

Stardock is proud to announce the release of IconPackager 4. IconPackager allows users to easily, and safely, change nearly all of the Windows icons at once using icon "packages".  IconPackager 4 has been through quite the overhaul, one of which is the most noticeable is the completely new user interface. There are hundreds of these packages available for download on WinCustomize.   Creating or modifying an icon pack is as simple as drag and dropping your own icons.  Us...

Every so often I get an e-mail or PM asking what the user levels on WinCustomize mean, and how people go about getting promoted.  So instead of continuing to write one-off responses, I've put up what I hope is a clear and definitive guide to the WC user levels, what they are, what benefits they hold and how the moderators go about selecting folks for promotion, and what we consider when making the final decision. I encourage everyone to take a quick look over the article, see where they...

Island Dog has put together another great screencast.  This time, it's an introduction to ObjectDock Plus.  The video walks you through the differences between ObjectDock and ObjectDock Plus.  Topics covered are dock customization,  tabbed docks, the weather docklet, adding shortcuts, icons, custom flyouts and even how to use ObjectDock as a complete task bar replacement. Check out the full screencast here .

Last week I posted a little preview of the upcoming changes to the WC Help page .  The idea was to make the page easier to navigate, easier to read, more inviting/friendly and give us the ability to expand on the help resources we could provide on the page.  The old help page was just a bunch of link lists that weren't very organized and hadn't been updated in years.  The format of the page and the content itself basically ensured that virtually no one would use it.  We als...

G4TV's X-Play recently reviewed Twilight of the Arnor, giving it an incredible 5 out of 5!  Like just about everyone else who's reviewed the game, they loved the tech trees, the increased galaxy size, improved visuals & performance and even the new content creation tools. Since it's X-Play, there's also a video review... Click the story link to read their full review.

It's been over three months since Sins of a Solar Empire hit store shelves, and soon it will be readily available at retail in Europe as well.  In the months since release, the reviews have continued to trickle in one at a time here and there.  Today, I have a quick round-up of a few of the most recent reviews posted for Sins.  Overall, with this latest bunch Sins of a Solar Empire has a solid 88% on GameRankings . Game Chronicles - 9.2 "I'll spare you the pun of "it wo...

Yesterday, Steve Butts of PC.IGN posted his review of Galactic Civilizations II: Twilight of the Arnor.  The result?  A respectable 9.1/10 review.  The two-page review covers everything from the unique racial tech trees and planetary improvements, to the new Ascension victory condition and the return of the Terror Star. Steve closes out his review of the final Galactic Civilizations II review with this: There are no two ways about it: if you like space strategy games, you...

WinCustomize is home to skinners from around the globe, and as we've realized in recent years, a large part of our community comes from China.  As reports continue to come in about the damages caused by the earthquake in central China we wanted to take a moment today to reach out to all of our affected community members; forum goers and skinners alike. We'd like you to, when you can, drop us a note on this thread to let everyone know you're OK.  Also, if you've spoken to any other ...

Master Skinner and former site moderator gef is back with some brand new free DesktopX themes for your skinning enjoyment.  Classic is designed for 1680x1050 resolution only, while Evolve will work for either 1680x1050 or 1280x1024. Classic Evolve Oh, and he also tossed out a new RightClick theme... Give them a try and let gef know what you think!

Long-time skinner and recently returned to WinCustomize after a long hiatus, APB has put out a second fantastic WindowBlinds Skin: Sirach Using a definite DeviantArt color scheme/feel, Sirach is an XP-only WB skin (Vista version coming soon) that takes advantage of virtually everything WB6 has to offer on XP.  Varying transparencies, overlapping glass panels, slightly rounded buttons, and excellent highlighting make this a must-try skin for everyone still running WinXP. Give the ...

If you're a fan of Sins of a Solar Empire, you may have seen the game achievement "Space Ponies" in the achievements list.  The origin of the pony is a long tale to tell.  Suffice it to say, it's a joke from early in the Sins of a Solar Empire beta test that grew and took on a life of it's own, and became a bit of a forum favorite joke. Turns out that one of the guys in the Sins community makes custom embroidered hats.  PoorManDSO ( www.darkstaroutpost.com ) had a few of the ha...

We've made it a full month now with the SkinCast!  For Episode 4, WinCustomize Administrator Jafo joins the fun to talk to us a bit about the history of skinning and WinCustomize.  Unfortunately, mymicrophone blew up about 2min before we started to record so this week is just Island Dog and Jafo. Next week, we're hoping to pull in RomanDA to talk about DesktopX and all various things gadget related. Remember, you can subscribe to us via iTunes and receive updates as soon as we p...

Ever thought about creating a custom font but weren't quite sure how to go about it?  Not quite sure how to put the font file together?  Well, the folks at FontShop have put together one of the coolest customization web apps I've seen; FontStructor .  Using an incredibly simple interface, you can draw your font out letter by letter, pixel by pixel.  It even has a large selection of customized shapes, or "bricks" as they call them in the application.  Think of FontStru...

I hope everyone had a great weekend and did something nice for their mom on Mother's Day.  Now that it's Monday once again, it's time to look through the gallery and pick out what I think is some of the best work submitted to the site over the weekend.  Here goes...