We had a good time at deviantART Summit. For a first-time thing it came off rather well. We got to meet a lot of people from the community.  If you missed it, below is a link to a video of what the show looked like and on my personal page (frogboy.wincustomize.com) you can go to the photo album tab to see some pictures from the show.

We're here for day 2 of deviantART Summit. Yesterday we met a lot of people from the community.  I did a class on how to create skins, icons, themes, etc.

With me is Mormegil, author of many of the most popular icon packages on the net.  He's been doing live icon creation demos here at the Stardock booth.

I've also been taking some video which I'll put up as soon as I get a way to transfer them to the computer.

We're here at the deviantART Summit this week.  It's a show where people from the art community, which includes graphics designers (and skinners which are the particular type of artist who create content for our software).

I haven't done a show like this in a long time.  But I'll be keeping a daily blog of what is going on.

Today and tomorrow at the Hollywood Palladium the first annual deviantART Summit is taking place. If you live in the LA area, come up and see it, it's looking pretty good.

I'm there, Moremgil is here, Cordellia is here, and lots of other people from the community. We have a booth here along with companies such as Adobe, Corel, Linspire, and many others.

Watch this space for photos and updates on what's happening.

Nearly every day we receive emails from users asking why we don't have a section for a given program.  The answer is usually fairly straight forward (often depressingly straight forward):  The people who make program X don't respond to emails from us.

To have a gallery on WinCustomize.com the following criteria have to be met:

(1) The program that uses the content has to be reasonably popular

(2) The people who make the program have to be willing to link to their gallery in a way that will send users here.

(3) The people who make the program whose content we'd be hosting have to agree to help "seed" the gallery to get it going.

That's pretty much it.  So if you have a favorite program whose skins you wish we had, contact the authors and ask them to contact us about getting a gallery up for them.  WinCustomize.com has 2.1 MILLION registered users and monthly traffic that exceeds 3 million unique visitors, it's a great way to get a program much greater visibility.  But in return, we need the program authors to send us traffic too.

Blizzard has released the official World of Warcraft Desktop. The suite, created for Stardock Media by Apocalypse_67 and Adam  Najmanowicz (lead developer of Stardock SkinStudio) combines both original artwork and in-game interface graphics from Blizzard's popular massively multiplayer game.

The suite incorporates technology from Stardock's Object Desktop in the form of Theme Manager OEM which has been previously licensed by companies such as Microsoft, Alienware, ATI, nVidia, Nintendo, and others to deliver branded desktops.

On a personal note, this is one of the best suites I've ever seen. And it's free.

Visit the WorldOfWarcraft.com website to get it or you can download it directly here.

Blizzard has released the official World of Warcraft Desktop. The suite, created for Stardock Media by Apocalypse_67 and Adam  Najmanowicz (lead developer of Stardock SkinStudio) combines both original artwork and in-game interface graphics from Blizzard's popular massively multiplayer game.

The suite incorporates technology from Stardock's Object Desktop in the form of Theme Manager OEM which has been previously licensed by companies such as Microsoft, Alienware, ATI, nVidia, Nintendo, and others to deliver branded desktops.

On a personal note, this is one of the best suites I've ever seen. And it's free.

Visit the WorldOfWarcraft.com website to get it or you can download it directly here.

By 8pm EST tonight beta 2 should be available and it's using our new (and largely untested in a large scale) distributed network environment we've been working on for the past several months which should, in theory, provide secure downloads at very very high speeds.

You download via Stardock Central.

However, if it doesn't work for you, report here.  Some things to make sure of:

1) Make sure you pre-ordered the game already or have an active TotalGaming.net subscription.

2) Make sure you are using the California server (you shouldn't have to worry about this but..). From SDC that's tools->settings->Internet

3) Make sure you have your serial # in there. That's tools->settings->Galactic Civilizations II (or TotalGaming.net if you have an active subscription to hat).

4) Make sure you have "Show pre-release versions" checked off at the bottom of SDC.

5) Make sure the email you used to buy the game is the same one you are using for your Stardock.net account.  This is important since it doesn't just know who you are. It has to match the email addresses when it activates it.

If all that fails, respond here.  We will be working on this.  Also, please report if it worked fine for you so that we can at least know others are able to use it fine.

Beta 2 of Galactic Civilizations II should be available by 8pm EST to those who have PRE-ORDERED the game. But as a bonus (cough cough) you'll also get to beta test the new Stardock.net backend which is being prepped for TotalGaming.net Phase 2 which is due out next week.

You will be amongst the first (okay, the first) people to try out the new backend as you download the beta via Stardock Central.  Which means, naturally, it's probably not going to work right for many of you.  If you are one of the lucky winners of some weird download error, don't worry, we'll be working on this stuff tonight and tomorrow.  With any luck, hopefully it'll download fine for most of you.  The joys of distributed/secure network distribution.  It may not work right yet but it's really cool in theory! <g>.  For those of you it does work correctly for, you should be able to download it at very VERY high speeds (my Comcast connection was bringing it down at 500K per second).

If you do run into problems downloading it, go to the forums and I will be creating a topic there.  Remember, don't expect to see it until 8pm EST.