PC Gamer's (UK) Tom Francis has a 3-day game diary up.

Check it out!

As some of you know, Stardock went through a lot of changes last year as it transitioned from being a small company to a significantly larger company. The growing pains were pretty apparent as outlined in this article "How Stardock failed the community".

The problems were identified and have been addressed and I won't go into too many details here (we'll talk more about them in the upcoming Stardock Magazine) but suffice to say users of Object Desktop and ThinkDesk will be very pleased.

The biggest challenge has been dealing with Windows Vista's release while providing new and interesting things for Windows XP users.  Over the past year or so, the rate in new updates and releases from Stardock has slowed way way down despite us hiring more developers.  There are a number of reasons for this but the biggest has been in having to put in resources to support Windows Vista.  That transition is nearly complete and a shared code-base will let us get back to more consistent updates (though 64-bit support remains a pain that we're dealing with).

But starting this month (in fact, starting tomorrow) you'll start seeing changes happening in pretty rapid fire that will continue all summer and into Fall. Stay tuned!

Next week Stardock will be unveiling some of the new things coming in Object Desktop 2008 in the May issue of Stardock Magazine.

If you don't already get Stardock Magazine emailed to you, click the link below to set youreslf up.

As a kid, I was afraid of bees. I mean, hysterically afraid.  To be fair, I probably had good reason, I'd been stung hundreds of times by the time I was 12.  I grew up next to a swamp and was constantly getting stung by bees, hornets, wasps, etc. 

Admittedly, most of the stings were due to my own idiocy. Okay, nearly all were due to idiocy.  One time, after getting stung when I was 8, I "declared war" on the big wasp nest and attacked it with a stick.  The wasps won.  I was not a very bright boy.  As my 1st grade teacher said to my mom (seriously) "The world needs ditch diggers."

It wasn't until I was older that I realized that most people didn't get stung by bees a lot. I had just assumed being stung regularly was a normal thing.  I was afraid of bees because of the sound they made and just some psychological impact of seeing them flying around. 

Being stung, other than stinging (no pun intended) had no side effect.  I didn't even know until high school that some people were allergic to bees. Heck, I didn't even know people were supposed to swell up or get any mark at all.  I'd get stung and just watch the little stinger pumping in my hand, arm, leg, whatever.  I'd eventually pull it out but there wasn't even a red mark.

I'm still afraid of bees.  I really don't like having an irrational fear of something.  So I've decided to take up bee keeping.  I bought a 3 acre property that has nothing on it presently and am thinking of raising honey bees. I'm only at the beginning phase of educating myself as to what is involved. The next step is buying the gear and then finally getting the actual queen bee to start the hive.

I also think it is something good for my kids to be exposed to as well.  Funny thing, my oldest son was stung by a bee just today. If my wife hadn't seen it, people would probably not believe him -- not even a mark.

Last year was another great year of skinning. And we've gone through literally thousands and thousands of skins to pick out the 10 best skins made last year.  Check the article linked below to find out the best skins and skinners we could find.

Last year was another great year for skinning. Users from around the world created some incredibly fantastic skins. 

Culturally, skinning is a great deal different today than it was back in the late 90s.  Back then, a popular skin might get a 1000 downloads. I remember when the first "Aqua" skins came out and the infamous "WinAqua" from Dangeruss managed to get 5 THOUSAND downloads total which was, back 2000 or so, a real milestone. Now, downloads of 50,000 are common and most of the top skins can expect to be reaching towards 100,000 downloads.

The popularity of skins has altered the way skins are made. Designs tend to be much more mainstream.  While programs such as WindowBlinds and Winamp allow for pretty free-form skin designs, the trend has been to make them conservative and "clean" to appeal to the widest audience.

In this article, we look at some of the best skins of last year. This article is, by no means, the end all be all list, we do try to include a good selection of the best creations from the past year.

WindowBlinds

WindowBlinds is a 3rd party program developed by Stardock (whom I work for) that lets users apply GUI skins (often called visual styles) that change the overall look and feel of the Windows interface (title bars, push buttons, Start bar, etc.).

To use WindowBlinds skins you will need to download WindowBlinds.

Last year was a great year for skinning. Not counting the great skins that came out of the GUI Championships, here are ten of the best (there were so many great ones to choose from so apologies to all the other great skinners we didn't include).

	danill0c's 5imple skin was one of the first WindowBlinds skins to really show off what WindowBlinds 5 could do. Both a practical skin and very polished at the same time. The subtle shadow effect is part of the skin (WindowBlinds 5's engine supports alpha blending effects like shadows and glass).  A terrific design all together. [Download] Vista Ready!
	Kol's Thallos was one of the best skins of last year without a doubt. Clean, smooth, and useful, its subtle shadows and polish made it a favorite for users. Thallos is unique in that Kol created both WindowBlinds and msstyles versions of it and hence won in both categories. The two are virtually identical. The WindowBlinds version adds toolbar icons, and a progress animation. [Download] Vista Ready!
	Josephs's Live Suite was one of the highlights of last year. Some argued that this is the look they wish they'd updated Windows 2003 Server to look like. A good step between Windows XP and Windows Vista. [Download] Vista Ready!
	ChaNinja's MotoXP B1 was one of the most beautiful skins created last year. Both highly stylish and very usable. It comes in multiple styles, supports animation, and is very fast. [Download] Vista Ready!
	danillo0C was almost certainly the top skinner of 2006. Besides making the top GUI Championship skin Acrylic, he also made Aerial. This skin has it all and is incredibly usable and fully-featured. [Download] Vista Ready!
	JJ Ying was another skinning super-star last year and one of the best skins made last year was Ecliz Deluxe. The screenshot really doesn't do it justice as it comes in multiple styles including a clear glass version. A truly amazing skin. And as you can see, it works great on Vista as well as XP. [Download] Vista Ready!
	No best of 2006 list would be complete without tehZERO's Eminence.  With its cloudy stained glas title bars, clean design, it looks great on both Windows XP and Vista. [Download] Vista Ready!
	For users getting tired of Aero-like glassy skins, Buuf-OS from Gabriel provided great relief. With great toolbar icons (for XP users), great progress dialogs, and lots of other subtle tweaks and enhancements, it's just a beautiful and original skin. [Download] Vista Ready!
	Adni's VistaPlus was the most downloaded WindowBlinds skin of 2006 with nearly a half-million unique downloads.  It doesn't run on Windows Vista but for Windows XP users looking for a fantastic looking skin on Windows XP that in some respects is a better Vista than Vista, VistaPlus is a great choice. [Download]
	MikeB's Old Republic was one of the more original skins that also maintained a high degree of usability and polish. With a subtle shadow and distressed style, it's an awesome choice for users looking for something different. [Download] Vista Ready!

Some Popular Skinners

XP MSStyles

Last year might have been the twilight of XP msstyles with Windows Vista's arrival this year.  But it was still a great year for .MSSTYLES.  MSStyles is Microsoft's skin format designed for changing Windows XP's look and feel. While not as powerful as WindowBlinds, it has a significant following. Third-parties can make skins and use them provided that the uxtheme.dll is cracked to disable digital signing protection. Below are some of the notable ones we found made from last year.

To use .msstyles you will either need to crack the digital signing verification in uxtheme by patching it (which you can obtain at Neowin.net and elsewhere) or you can download/install SkinStudio and use it to convert them to WindowBlinds format. There's a quick guide for that here.  In the case where we took our own screenshots, they were taken on Windows Vista via WindowBlinds since XP msstyles won't run on Vista.

Here are some of the best from 2006!

	Luna Element 5 from Tornado was easily one of the favorites of users everywhere. With a clean UI that blends XP and Vista together seamlessly, Luna Element makes our list of one of the best skins of 2006. LE 5.1 released in January of this year keeps the updates going. [Download]
	Kol did double-duty with Thallos. Available both for WindowBlinds and as an msstyles, it was a user favorite. [Download]
	No top 10 list on msstyles would be complete without mentioning MohsinNaqi's Tener VS. What makes Tener so special is in the details. The taskbar is extremely well done and the colors are very carefully chosen. Mohsin Naqi is a top skinner with icon packages, wallpapers, WindowBlinds visual styles, and more (you can check out his site here). [Download]
	heylove's Area04 (Areao4.2), like many of the top msstyles, made deviantART's daily download (this one on New Year's Eve!).  It is significantly different than most of the msstyles we saw last year. Combined with its original design, clean style, and several different sub-styles, Aera04 makes our list. [Download]
	Schluepfer's very first visual style was Klarheit. And if this is what his first effort is, we can't wait to see what he makes for 2007! [Download]
	hsn's Mint 2.0 started its life as a Linux Gnome GTK2 theme and brought over to Windows XP. Despite not being "original", it is still one of our favorite skins of 2006 regardless of where its original platform was. For the shadow effect, you'll need a shadow program such as WindowFX. [Download]
	Tempura is another Linux GTK theme that was ported but like Mint, the platform is less important than the excellence in the skin itself. Lokheed had a great year and you can see his complete portfolio here. hsn's port of it really shines. You can see how it looked on Linux by going here. Like Mint, you'll need to download a program like WindowFX to get shadows. [Download]
	Bant's Reluna Em3lent is a great example of Bant's elegant design philosophy of creating usable, clean, and elegant skins. The skin actually comes in several different flavors that look significantly different from one another. Any individual sub-style would be on its own one of the top skins of the year. Getting them bundled together in this single visual style package makes it just that much sweeter. [Download]
	Cyberchaos's Aquanox VS was one of the most popular msstyles of 2006 with over 100,000 downloads at deviantART. Inspired by some of Kol's other work, this clean, usable and original skin makes our list. [Download]
	dobee's NeoGeniX's is one of the most polished and original looking msstyles of last year. It was a favorite of many of us this past year. When combined with the right icon package, a toolbar theme, and the NeoGeniX ObjectDock, users can give Windows a whole new look. [Download]

Winamp Skins

Winamp was the skinning program that started it all. Originally Winamp skins were very limited in what they could be.  But WinAmp 5 supports both a free-form skinning format as well as the easy but limited skinning format.  Here are some of the highlights from last year.

To use Winamp as your media player, you will need, of course, Winamp.

	NeuroSKINS Meridian was definitely one of the best looking Winamp skins we saw last year. Taking full advantage of the Winamp 5 skinning engine, it's both highly usable and just looks great. [Download]
	883's Drone was possibly the best Winamp skin of 2006 that we saw on WinCustomize.com. 883Design has been perfecting this design for quite awhile but its final arrival was Summer of 2006. [Download]
	Tiggz's GT3 skin was ranked on our list as one of the best Winamp skins we saw last year. Part of the GT3 skin series, it is a clean, bold look with a high degree of functonality. [Download]
	In a year with a lot of glass skins, GlassAMP from jeree01 one of the best we saw combining the signature glass look with a high degree of usability. [Download]
	While not as usable as the cleaner, simpler skins made by others, Skinister's self-named skin has a high degree of creativity and originality putting it on our list. [Download]
	faris's Cell skin was another favorite for many users. With over 50 different color styles and many different ways of using, Cell was easily one of the top skins of 2006. [Download]
	Inter-Pol.info AMP continued the trend of glass-styled skins. But unlike many skins, this one was able to carry it out without it looking like a Vista clone. An exceptional skin. [Download]
	Maybe we were a little biased but the Heavy Equipment community project (which delivered skins for dozens of programs) gets bonus points for letting users have their entire UI have a consistent look (screenshot of complete suite here). But regardless, it's still a great skin. Winamp skin from Elvee. [Download]
	MrV2K's Pebble skin has a great, polished design. Its usability to the user depends on the user of course but we found this to be one of the better Winamp skins we found this past year.  [Download]
	Snowman's 5imple Winamp skin takes a different route than most. It makes Winamp into an almost iTunes-ish media player with a very simple and clean skin based on the popular WindowBlinds skin. [Download]

Conclusions

That's it for this year. There are so many other skinnable programs out there that I wish there was time to cover them all. If you have your own list of favorite skins, feel free to comment here and I'll try to check in and update the bottom of this article with some other noteworthy lists or produce a follow-up with with favorite skins of other programs or ones you think we missed.

Related Articles

Changing icons on Windows Vista
New Vista Icons
Make XP look like Vista

Stardock has released IconPackager 3.2. IconPackager is a program that can change all the icons on Windows 2000, XP, and Vista by applying entire icon sets called "icon packages".

IconPackager 3.2 adds support for Windows Vista including the new "live folders" feature of Windows Vista making it the first (and only) program to support changing the new icons on Windows Vista.

IconPackager 3.2 also supports changing individual icons from a new "change icon" context menu for documents and most other files (EXE's can even have their icon changed from their properties dialog -- see this article for more details).

IconPackager is a free download. The full version costs $14.95 or can be purchased as part of Stardock's Object Desktop suite which includes WindowBlinds, IconPackager, DesktopX, DeskScapes, ObjectBar, and more.

View: IconPackager in action
View: Making an icon package
Download: IconPackager 3.2

If you were to name the 3 most popular skinning platforms -- that is, applications and/or skinning formats in terms of number of people using and number of people making skins for, what would they be?

My 3 would be WindowBlinds, uxtheme (msstyles), and Winamp. What would yours be?

Many people may not be aware of this but WindowBlinds has a reasonably powerful wallpaper management feature. Users can have WindowBlinds change wallpapers automatically and create a virtual library of wallpapers from a lot of different sources.

Island Dog has a very good article and video demo showing off this feature. Check it out.

Our resident "Colonel" is always advocating increases in the federal income tax rate.  What he doesn't realize is that federal income tax rates hurt the very people that he wants to help.

The government gets its money through a variety of sources. But mostly it comes from income taxes, payroll taxes, and corporate taxes.

But income taxes have multiple types within them: WAGES & CAPITAL GAINS.

Wages are taxed anywhere from 10% to 35% depending on how much you make.

But capital gains are a flat tax at 15% as long as you hold on to the stock for a year. Interest income works this way too.

And it is in the world of capital gains that the mega wealthy are able to make a lot of money but pay pay far less in taxes.  Congress has continued to tighten the laws to make it harder for individuals to get around paying at the wages rate (for instance, dividends aren't tax deductable for corporations and corporations have a higher tax rate than individuals now).

But the super-wealthy have tax attorneys who can play all kinds of games with the tax code.  Below are some common techniques that the super-wealthy use:

Low Interest Loans

As Warren Buffet pointed out recently, he could have lived quite comfortably without paying any taxes simply by having one of his companies give him loans each year. A loan isn't income.

Corporation Mania!

Open up enough LLCs to take care of your various needs, make sure they deduct effectively and you can end up with a bunch of companies with minimal "profit". The corporate tax rate on profits of less than $50,000 is 15%.  This kind of shell game can get pretty complicated and isn't worth playing unless you have immense amounts of money where saving even 10% in taxes can be helpful. 

One thing that many of these strategies try to avoid is medicare taxes. They're not capped (they should be IMO).  Medicare is 2.9% of a person's income. Hence, if you have $1 million in taxable wages, you would end up paying $29,000 in medicare which can get pretty obnoxious.  Hence, someone earning $10 million in income may find it makes more sense to distribute that income amongst corporations or find a way to pay it in dividends.

I'm not tax accountant or expert by any means.  But what I do know is that those who want "the rich" to pay more need to understand that the super rich aren't making most of their income through wages but through other sources such as capital gains and through corporations. 

Increasing the federal personal income tax rate definitely affects small business owners (a lot) as well as other economic drivers which in turn can have an adverse affect on the rest of society (small business owners create the majority of the jobs, take away their capital and they hire fewer people).