Possibly the coolest thing I've ever seen on my desktop is the new dynamic dream known as "Liquid Dream".  For users of Windows Vista Ultimate who have DeskScapes, Liquid Dream lets users combine their existing wallpaper with a water effect on top of it. Your wallpaper then appears to be under water with dripping effects and a reflection from above (that users can choose). And best of all, it does all this with hardly any impact on system resources thanks to the compositor in Windows Vista.

And it's very customizable by the user as they can pick:

• Time between water drops
• Size of water drops (bigger drops mean larger ripples)
• How reflective/transparent the water surface is
• Choose a sky to see reflected in the water (fluffy white clouds, or a starry night sky)
• Choose the background image that sits below the water. Pick from one of 3 provided images, or supply your own.

To users pick their wallpaper and then can control how the water flows over the wallpaper. The visual impact of it is incredibly cool. Here are some screenshots.

You can get Liquid Dream here.

The iPhone has arrived. So what's the verdict on the most anticipated electronic gadget of the year? I'll sum it up this way: Apple good. AT&T bad. That seems to be the consensus whether it be AT&T's slow Edge network or the awful typical customer service at AT&T stores versus Apple stores. Apple demonstrates once again that it really has its act together when it comes to producing and launching a new product. Being partnered with AT&T really just highlights that further since it gives a contrast.

Here are some of the more interesting reviews we've seen:

• Good forum discussion on iPhone impressions from users.
• Disecting an iPhone -- literally.
• Customer service: Apple rocks, AT&T flops.
• USA Today: Not perfect but worthy of hype
• MSNBC's iPhone first look
• New York Times: iPhone matches most of hype
• PC Magazine review

The strengths of the iPhone are mostly about its construction, fantastic UI, ease of use, good speaker, and WiFi support.  The downside revolves very largely on two points which some (myself included) consider show-stoppers.  First, unless you're using it in a WiFi area, forget surfing the net with it. The Edge network is dial-up quality. So web browsing is not going to be something you would want to do. Secondly, the battery cannot be removed and is expected to only last about 2 years. To replace the battery, users have to send their phone to Apple for battery replacement. I don't know about you but I either need my phone or I don't. Having it gone for a week or two is not something I can do and at $600, one assumes that the user needs their cell phone.

My personal take is to wait for a second-generation iPhone. One with a removable battery and 3G support.  I wouldn't be surprised to see that come out next year.  It's a bummer, however, that the iPhone has an exclusive with AT&T for 5 years.

The wife, kids and I are going up north this week to move stuff into the new cottage.  We built a cottage up in northern Michigan and after nearly a year of anticipation, it's done! We're very excited to see how it turned out (I've only had time to check on its progress one time).

So I'll be a bit out of touch for the next week or so.  Don't burn the place down!

If you've been noticing a dearth of new themes in the past month or so, you're not imagining it. And it's all our fault.  For the past several months, Stardock has been working on a truly massive skinning project called MyColors.  It has already teamed up with hundreds of companies, colleges, franchises, sports teams, etc. to created official, authorized themes that can then be sold to fans and "regular" people as a single install theme.

The idea is to let people buy for $20 a theme for their desktop where both the suite and the software are combined seamlessly. Users just press a button and it's on and press another button to turn it off. There's no configuration, no UI (other than choosing the theme). It's very straight forward.  And so far, we're very pleased with the success it's achieving.  We haven't been pushing MyColors very hard to WinCustomize users because it hasn't played very nice with WindowBlinds and IconPackager (i.e. order of install stuff) but that will soon change with the upcoming self-healing smart Theme Manager that's nearly done.

To give you an idea of the scope, by end of this year, there may be over 200 suites available.  Think about that -- between 1999 and 2006 there might have been a dozen or dozen and a half professional suites created.  But in one year, 200 suites have had to be made from scratch and approved by the partner.

So Stardock Design has been hiring skinners to work on this project.  All of SkinPlant and all of Pixtudio are working with Stardock Design. Alexandrie, Treetog, MikeB, ChaNinja, Hippy, Essorant, Voo, Gef, Danilo0c, Cerebro, ScottT, Mormegil, JJ Ying, and others are either working full time or now at Stardock or a good chunk of their time.  And that's not even a full list (I can't keep up with everything Stardock Design is working on and working with these days, it's the dream team of skinning so if I missed someone please forgive my incomplete knowledge).  But needless to say, it takes a bit of a chunk out of new skins and themes being made.

As an encore, a whole series of new WindowBlinds 6 and DesktopX 4 themes are going to be made by the dream team too and released so and then things will start to get back to normal.  But now you know why so many big skinners have been missing.  It's like the Apollo program of skinning.  Imagine someday being able to buy a PC and choose how you want it to look on the outside and inside (Stardock has teamed up with SkinIt who specializes in making skins for computer cases and laptops (they really are very cool, especially on laptops).  Or imagine going to the university computer lab and all the computers having the university theme instead of plain Windows?  And there's some big announcements coming up that I can't yet talk about but I think users will be extremely excited about some of the things coming up.

Here are some screenshots below of MyColors themes already available:

Another big thing that's been going on is the development of IconDeveloper 2.0. This is a complete rewrite that we think users will be very pleased with.  It should go into beta relatively soon (very close to the beta release of SkinStudio 6 which is a radical departure and also a complete rewrite of SkinStudio).

One of the big things that's resulted from bringing on so many skinners as part of Stardock is that now the software follows more the needs of the skinners. That is, for programs like DesktopX 4 and WindowBlinds 6, the skinners are telling us the things they'd like to create and the software capabilities are being enhanced to suit their needs.  This is in stark contrast to how things have been done previously where the developers came up with features and then tried to get skinners to make use of them. Wait till you see some of the killer stuff that's being made.

Another benefit of all the skinners coming on board is that more "stuff" will be able to be made for subscribers.  WinCustomize subscribers, for instance, will start to see more subscriber-exclusive content being made.  The site will start to have special areas to show off this content so that it's easy to manage and see the benefits of being a WinCustomize subscriber.  Similarly, Object Desktop users will start seeing "content" components that are basically skins and themes made by Stardock Design exclusively for those users.

No worries about lots of free skins and themes continuing to be made by the community. Once we quit hogging all their time, you'll see things get back to normal. In addition, with the arrival of better skinning tools this Fall, skinning will start to get a lot easier.  For instance, in addition to SkinStudio 6, we hope to allow the development of WindowBlinds 6 skins using purely Photoshop layers (no editor required). That won't come until after SkinStudio 6 but it will open the door to skinning to a lot of new skinners. 

 Skinners have an excellent opportunity to update their skins to take advantage of Windows Vista with minimal work: Vista shadows.

WindowBlinds 5.51 supports painting the shadows in Windows Vista as part of a UIS2 formatted WindowBlinds skins. 

To add support simply open the UIS file and in the [Personality] area add: AllowVistaShadows=1 and from then on, on Windows Vista, your skin will display the Vista shadow underneath it. 

Feel free to update your WindowBlinds skin on WinCustomize to support this feature as Vista users will likely appreciate the cool results!

JoeUser is a lot faster than it used to be and it's currently being rewritten in .NET to support a lot of new features. But I still find myself drawn to using BlogNavigator.

It works on any blog site that I know of but for me, creating blogs is so much easier with Blog Navigator than messing with the website which seems to take ages.

I've taken up beekeeping as some of you know. And I'm realy enjoying it.

The gotcha is that you're not supposed to mess with the bees very often. I find myself going out there and opening up the hive nearly every day which is a big no no (because it really disturbs them apparently) but what kind of hobby is one that you only go out there every few weeks?

I've tried to get into cars a bit. Ever since I got my Jaguar S-Type R, I've started appreciating cars more. But it's hard to find a decent car talk community and the ones I have found are full of pretty infantile people or people who can't afford anything beyond say a Mustang and hence want to crap on anything that costs more than $30,000.

For those of you reading this, what sorts of hobbies do you have outside the computer?

I'm working on an article on the above topic.

Is it getting too hard for people to get into skinning?

Consider these items:

• To make icons for Windows Vista now requires the icon author to invest in making 256x256 icons. When Windows 3.1 came out, 32x32 was the largest sized icon. A 256x256 icon has about as many pixels as a screenshot of a full-screen DOS VGA game did.
• Windows Media Player is incredibly complicated to skin for and the media player market is very fragmented. I use iTunes myself which isn't even skinnable. So there's a lot of work to make skins but the skinnable media player market has dramatically shrunk from the Winamp glory days.
• Making a GUI skin that looks as good or better than Vista Aero is very difficult now. When skinning first took off, it was Windows classic which looks like crap. And so even if you were just skinning the title bar and borders, it was still a lot better than what you started with.

So what do you think this means and what could be done? I have some opinions on this but I'd like to hear what you guys think first.

I've said this previously but it's worth saying again - widgets/gadgets have done bad things to skinning IMO. As someone who helped promote this problem before realizing the net result, I deserve my share of the blame.

I think one of the things we need to come up with are skinnable widgets.  It's something we're working on for Object Desktop but it's still very early. The idea being that making NEW widgets would become signficantly more difficult but that skinning existing widgets would be extremely easy (and let's face it, there's really only a couple dozen widgets out there with the rest being derivatives -- clocks, weather widgets, RSS feeds, and..um clocks). 

So how would you picture such a system working?

You could, for instance, have clock widget skins or you could tryto have a universal format for the widget platform where a single skin would work on all the types of supported widgets. That would make things better for the user but harder on the skinner and the gadget/widget maker.

I'm more inclined to have the platform be more akin to something where you would have skins for a type of widget (weather widgets for instance). So a weather skin would skin ALL weather widgets but wouldn't skin say RSS feed widgets.

What's your view?