Show us your desktops for November. You can upload your screenshot to us here on WinCustomize or if you're really lazy, use http://www.imageshack.us and do it there. 
Screenshots >1024x768 shoudl be thumbnailed.
I love statistics.
The generosity index is from the people at the Catalogue of Philantrophy. It is computed by taking each state's average income and the state's charitable donations and then ranking them.
Turns out, red states do much better than blue states:
Now before conservatives get too excited about demonstrating their moral superiority, I would be interested in seeing a chart of the original data - that is, the average income per person per state. Because this may be heavily influenced by income.
Because this could just as easily be a table that proves that the more you tax people, the less they give to charity.
One of the things that worries me about the skinning community is its occasional flirtation with elitism. I see this most pronounced with the treatment sometimes awarded to those who port skins from other platforms or programs. So I want to say it outright - porting skins is important too. Many skinners get their start porting skins in various forms. Dangeruss's first skins were ports. My first skins were ports. Alexandrie's first skins were ports. And so were many others.
While SkinStudio does make it much easier to port certain skin formats than they otherwise would be, a proper port still requires quite a bit of work. When someone ports a .msstyle to WindowBlinds there is still more work to be done. There's a lot of stuff in WindowBlinds that good ports have to add onto. And that takes work. It also takes work to go through and make sure everything is done quite right. It's not as trivial as one might think. I have ported quite a few skins to WindowBlinds that I liked on other platforms. I know that since WindowBlinds runs faster and skins non-theme aware programs, that I want to run my visual styles on WindowBlinds.
We now have a check box that asks if a skin has been ported. So we can make sure such ports don't end up at the top of a contest or something. But otherwise, give some props to the people who help bring you skins. Don't discourage skinning in any form.
One of the big news items this week was the dual releases of Konfabulator 1.8 for Windows and DesktopX 2.3. Konfabulator has definitely been winning the marketing war. By implying that Apple's development of Dashboard prompted them to move to Windows, they were able to garner a great deal of mainstream media coverage. While untrue, that's not was got me. What's gotten my goat was the implication that Windows doesn't have something like Konfabulator. It does and has for years before Konfabulator existed on any platform. Putting DesktopX aside for a moment, programs like Samurize, Kapsules, and Avedesk already exist, are free, have large followings, and aren't so obscure that the media should be unaware of them.
What that will translate into I'm not sure. The widget market is pretty saturated as-is. I know what DesktopX's sales are. Whether the widget market is commercially viable in the long term remains to be seen.
Well, that's about all I have time for right now. I've got to help get ObjectDock 1.05 announced out there...
The fog of war in Galactic Civilizations II is going to be quite different than in the first one. Much of that is due to the 3D engine.
But you would be surprised how many details go into the fog of war. What color should it be. It's in space so unexplored can't be black. It had a slightly violet hue to it in the first Galactic Civilizations. We decided to go with that again.
But then there's the matter of how to treat zones of influence. In the first GalCiv zones of control was by sector. Now it's based on the individual planets in a particular sector. That means they tend to be irregularly shaped.
But how should the fog of war deal with that? Your zone of control/influence may extend beyond your sensor range. Should it paint over the fog of war? Be hidden? Or only extend to your explored area. What about alien civlizliations? Should you get to see their zones before you've made contact with them? The realisitc option is obvious but what about the fun part? It's not a no brainer.
So that's what the engine team was working on. Meanwhile, the Arcean models were being heavily tweaked by the art team and we got some new ships in. We did get bad news that the new artist we were trying to get in won't be able to join us due to some family issues. So we still need a lead 3D modeler for our Master fantasy game we have in preproduction (lead 3D modeler means you have 5 to 10 years of real experience btw).
The UI team is going well but the new planet design screen has been a real challenge to do. It's so much more important but we want the game not to seem like a spread sheet or too complex. So that's really been tough.
So you've downloaded a cool widget here at WinCustomize.com but you would like to tweak it. How do you do that? This article shows just how easy it is to do it with a step by step guide.
So you've found some widgets you like but you want to tweak them. How do you do that with DesktopX?
First we should probably explain some basic concepts of DesktopX. There are many different programs these days that let you deal with widgets and each one has its own take on the concept.
In DesktopX, widgets are executables -- .EXEs. That means you don't need to even have DesktopX running to use them. They're just like any other program. You only need to have DesktopX installed on your computer to use them.
But if you want to edit a widget, you need to bring it back inside the DesktopX environment. In DesktopX, everything is an object. These objects can be grouped together and exported as a widget. Or they can be exported as a desktop theme if you build an entire desktop. You can also export groups of objects as an object pack if you decide to just run your "widgets" as part of your DesktopX environment (the advantage is they use less memory since they don't have the overhead of running as a program but the disadvantage is that you have to run DesktopX all the time).
The analogy we use is to think of DesktopX being like Microsoft Word and widgets being .PDF files (Acrobat documents). You can certainly read your documents in Microsoft word (like you can run widgets as objects in DesktopX). You can of course read Acrobat files on their own. And if you want to edit an Acrobat file you have to find a way to bring it back into a word processor like Microsoft Word to edit.
So for this example, I have downloaded a clock widget. It's called CoreClock.exe.
It's a very nice widget that lets me change the color of the edge and I can resize it too on the fly. But it's too dark for my tastes.
So I load up DesktopX and choose import.
Then I click on the "widgets" option in the import dialog so that it will display my installed widgets and then select the clock.
So here I have my two clocks. The one on the left is the original widget running as its own process. The one on the right has been imported as a grouped set of DesktopX objects.
So I right click on my clock and go to the states tab and change the hue and brightness of it to be brighter.
Now that I'm done, I right click on it and choose export.
I want to export both the selected object and the related objects (i.e. the whole clock). I am exporting it as a widget (If I had DesktopX Pro I could export it as a stand-alone program that would run on everyone's computer).
I gave it an icon and name here. I don't like widgets using up taskbar and system tray items but I have that option.
And here's my final result ready to use as a widget.
Each website no the Internet has to wrestle with the issue of copyright. This is our policy.
Fair Use
Skins, themes, icons may use content created by others for the purposes of making what is popularly considered "fan art". So if you want to make a Star Wars based wallpaper or Superman skin you may do so. We reserve the right to remove it in the event that the owner of the trademarked or copyrighted material objects (for instance, Marvel objecting to non-licensed use of Marvel characters) but in general we will accept skins, themes, icons, and wallpapers that are fan art as long as the user uploading them created it. Taking someone else's Batman wallpaper and uploading it is not going to be accepted. Creating your own Batman wallapper would be accepted.
Ports
Porting skins and themes created by others for a different platform or program is acceptable. Ports are often a great way for new skinners to learn how to skin. My first skins were ports. However, you must get permission to port the skin/theme from the original author in order to distribute it. Porting of operating systems is generally accepted and would fall under the "fan art" rules.
As a general philosophy, skins and themes that highlight and promote favorably an existing thing that is already known to people is acceptable. That is why we accept fan art but why it's not okay to take an individual's skins and port them without permission.