One of the things WinCustomize prides itself on is the accuracy of its download counts. While some sites seem to intentionally or unintentionally inflate their download counts (massively) to give the perception of popularity, we have refrained from that tempation because we feel it is very important that authors have an accurate gauge of roughly how many people are actually using their work.

For example, if you download Author X's skin and then come back and download it again, the download count is only incremented by 1 total (not 2). While no system is perfect, we believe WinCustomize's download counting system is amongst the most accurate counts out there.

But since download counts are important to skin authors, we want to make sure they are aware that WinCustomize's download statistics are accurate and that a considerable amount of work has gone into making sure that they are accurate.

Anyway, this is an announcement that in the next few weeks we will be providing a lot more statistics to skin authors about their downloads. So on their downloads there will be a link. The skin author will be able to click on that link and see a lot more data.  We won't provide who specifically downloaded the skin (since that's private information) but pretty much anything else is open for discussion.

What we are interested in knowing is what data you would like to see about downloads on your skins. Let us know here what data you'd like to see.

So you want to create icons eh? In the bad old days, creating icons was quite a pain. Probably the best thing that's happened to PC icon creation is Windows XP. That's because Windows XP supports alpha channels in its icons.

Alpha channels allow for icons to anti-alias themselves. Or put another way, they don't look so blocky because the edges can blend in to your wallpaper or the folder background or whatever. This has been a boon to both professional and amateur icon authors.  Previously we talked about how to change your icons. But when it comes to creating your own icons the solutions have been problematic.

You can either pay quite a bit of money for an industrial strength program such as Microangelo. Microangelo is a very good program for icon artists who want to have a powerful graphics editor as part of the package. But such power comes at a cost (it's $39.95).  At the opposite extreme there are various freeware programs that, with enough effort, will let you crank out an icon.

But what about people who just want to sit down and take an existing image and create an icon with it? IconDeveloper can do that -- for free. And for users who want to do things like recolor existing images, make large icons, etc. IconDeveloper Pro ($19.95) can do that too.

Let me walk you through what IconDeveloper does so you can see what I mean.

IconDeveloper is basically designed for users who have .BMP, .JPG, and .PNG files that they've either downloaded elsewhere or created themselves with a program like Photoshop or Illustrator or whatever. Once they select one of those images, IconDeveloper will automatically take care of generating all the common icon sizes, scaling them very nicely (this is something that can't be understated - scaling of images always shows up as a bullet point but there is a world of difference in how well different programs scale images, IconDeveloper probably does it as well or better than pretty much anything out there). So in a few clicks you have an icon.

Let me give you a real world example:

I have a folder full of emails and other documents left over from Christmas. Letters, thank you letters, etc.  I wanted to create a folder that has this stuff in it and to make it stick out in "My Documents" I decided to give it its own icon. I wanted to do it as a Christmas tree.

So I went and found a Christmas tree .PNG file on Google and downloaded it and loaded it into IconDeveloper (drag and drop).

So there it is. I have a big old tree here. Then I selected it and chose make into an icon.

I now have my icon. That's it. It's an icon.

So here we my icon on my desktop. Looks pretty sweet eh? I am big into changing individual folders on my system because I have sooo much stuff.  These days with 100s of gigabytes of disk space, icons are a pretty useful way of being able to distinguish something important from the rest and that's why programs like IconDeveloper and IconPackager can be quite useful.

Sometimes I just want to change the color of an icon. You know, have some folder that's usually blue be red so that when I'm browsing through stuff it sticks out.  IconDeveloper does this extremely well.

Here I just picked a folder icon I liked in an icon library, went to color and told it to make the blues into oranges. And then saved it.

This can be taken one step further with batch processing.

Now I'm taking an icon package and changing all the icons at once. In this case, these are the Orion icons I bought. But there is no "Orion Gold". No problem, with IconDeveloper I just loaded up the emerald color and changed the emerald to gold. Look very closely at that screenshot. See how it only changed the emerald colors to gold without messing with the other colors!

This goes for those of us who are really into "Skinning" Windows. I will download a skin and often find it's not quite the right color. Sure, I could load it up in Photoshop and mess with it myself. But I'm a very lazy man. Dangerously lazy. Thankfully IconDeveloper makes it easy for someone of my low ability to change a skin in a few clicks.

Here is a Media Player skin I downloaded from WinCustomize.com. It's created by popular skin author Starone. But I don't like the color. Or I should say, it doesn't match the rest of my system. No problem, I'll just make it blue. Same process as before.

Net result of it. Okay, I didn't do a great job with my blue but you get the picture.

For me, the reason I wanted Stardock to make IconDeveloper is I just wanted a simple program that would let me take existing images and make them into icons. No fancy stuff, just turn these files into icons easily. I also wanted to be able to take icons and change their color all at once without a lot of effort (such as not having to worry about color changing changing everything. If I just want my blue folders to be olive that's what I want. I don't want everything olive, just the blue-ish parts).

You can download IconDeveloper at www.icondeveloper.com

It's also part of Object Desktop, a suite of desktop enhancement utilities.

Have fun!

 

I've lost quite a bit of time this week m igrating to Outlook. I am sure it'll be wonderful when I finsih but in the meantime it's been a major pain. The main issue with it has been moving the hundreds of thousands of emails I've received in Outlook Express over the past 4 years over to it.

I took advantage of my not-completely-fair flex time to simply go home while the migration took place which took several hours to read in all the files and then remove the tens of thousands of duplicates.

While home I put together the IconPackager media guide https://www.stardock.com/products/iconpackager/media Kris and Jake are putting together the CDs to send to the media on it. Tonight I'm going to turn that media guide on the web into a regular Word document with nice formatting and send over so that we can get those over to the media relations people.

Meanwhile, DesktopX 2.1 is still underoing work. It has two main issues:

a) Imported objects don't delete all the parts unless they are grouped. Alberto says he has this fixed internally now.
Certain goofy ActiveX controls size themselves problematically.

Item b actually led to a different problem - we need to bundle some basic ActiveX controls with DesktopX to handle list boxes and group boxes so that we don't have to rely on the user having MS Office on.

Tonight/Tomorrow I have to put together the scenarios for the GalCiv expansion pack beta that is due tomorrow night. I'm a bit nervous about it and we'll have to be ready early if we're going to get it out tomorrow. I'd rather avoid having it come out on Friday.

IconPackager doesn't always get a lot of mention. But really it should. It is one of the most basic pieces of Windows customization software out there.

You want to change your icons? There is no better supported, more featured, more popular way to do it than with IconPackager.

And let's face it, lots of Windows icons really are awful. And here on WinCustomize, there are thousands and thousands of icons already in IconPackager format ready to be applied to let you tweak your system to the way you want it.

Here's a link to a JoeUser.com article that goes into detail about some of the cool features of IconPackager that even long time users of it may not be aware of.

A lot of people don't realize how cool IconPackager is. Heck, a lot of people don't even know what IconPackager is.

Let me start at the beginning:

IconPackager is a program for letting you change virtually all your Windows icons. Microsoft's "themes" can only change a handful.  IconPackager was the first program to go beyond that to change nearly all your icons. It was actually quite difficult to develop because early on Windows did not cooperate with that sort of thing but it has gotten better over time. But because it was first and supports all the versions of Windows, IconPackager is by far the most popular and most complete and most supported way of changing your Windows icons.

Put simply, if you are sick of your standard Windows icons, IconPackager is the way to change them.

IconPackager's main interface

But like I said, most people don't realize just how cool IconPackager is. Most people who use it just use it to apply icon packages and stop there. But the full version also adds an "Icon" tab to every file on Windows. So seamless was this that it took me a bit to verify that this wasn't just a "native" part of Windows. That's probably why so many people don't realize that it's IconPackager adding this, it looks like it's part of Windows:

Right click on a file in Windows from Explorer and you will see a new tab "icon"

One feature I suspect very few people are aware of is that IconPackager can actually change the icons of individual programs. I'm not talking about short-cuts (Windows lets you change the icons of shortcuts). I'm talking about changing the icon of an actual program. As someone stuck with tons of nasty looking program icons (what is it with software developers and ugly low resolution icons in the year 2004???) this is a big deal to me. I don't like nasty looking icons. I don't like having my system just so and then see some 32x32 icon made by some coder that is being resized to 48x48 that looks just awful.

Here it is in action. Okay, Contego is something we're working on and so it's our ugly icon. But look, I can go and browse and find something else and replace it. This is the actual directory, not a short-cut.

Many people who use IconPackager day in and day out probably have no idea just how much it has advanced. With the release of IconDeveloper, things have gotten even better because now it's easier to just create your own icons and then replace them via IconPackager.

Lemme give you an example of the type of thing that drives me nuts, even with icon packages -- FILE TYPES. I'll be browsing through my stuff and I'll see .WBA files or .CDR files or whatever and they will look incredibly awful. I.e. you will get the standard Windows file icon with a 16x16 version of the program pasted on top of it. What's up with that? That sucks. But with IconPackager and can go and change all that and it definitely makes things nicer.

I'm sure you've seen what I mean. Take my new system. I installed Corel Draw and opened up a folder with some .CDR files...

Yikes that's nasty. This is exactly the type of polish thing that Mac users point to when saying why they prefer Macs. Of course, Object Desktop (let alone IconPackager) is a lot cheaper than buying a Mac.

IconPackager lets you just right-click on one of those files and choose a different icon for them.

Much better...

I don't usually write about IconPackager because it's such a staple. It's been around for so long and its evolution, while dramatic overall, has been gradual when you're dealing with this stuff day in and day out. But it's really one of those basic utilities that many (if not most) PC users who are in front of their machines all day may find useful for them. Changing your icons to ones you prefer is a very basic customization option. Those who would scoff at such customization should be reminded that everything else in our lives comes in different sizes and shapes based on our tastes, why shouldn't our desktops?

I am a very lucky guy. My wife is truly my partner in life. We share our lives together in ways that I could scarcely have ever hoped.

We have very complementary roles in our home. She is the home maker as well as someone who helps with the company as time permits. But she makes home making into a true art.

For example, when I come home from work, I never know what wonderful and new thing she'll have made for our family. Tonight was salmon with fresh strawberries (in January!), fresh beans, some pasta, glass of wine all aesthetically put together beautifully. Most guys would be happy if this happened on special occasions. But in our home, it's quite normal. My wife is like a world class chef that is exclusively working at our home for herself and us (me and our two children).

Our home itself is very homey. We have both always prided ourselves in putting creature comforts over materialism. We'll go without some things so taht we can have the house a bit warmer for instance. Our home is a very comfortable place. My wife's other pass time is massages. My wife gives great massages and I can say that they make a big difference in quality of life, especially having a stressful career.

Now, I must confess, my instinct would be to say that she's too good to be true. Not for the above reasons but because she's interested science fiction, we used to play D&D together, we are interested in many of the same things as I am and vice versa, we have similar tastes, she's open minded about trying new things in all sorts of ways. Like I said, she sounds too good to be true.

And yet, this May will be our 10 year wedding anniversary. This April 3 will be the 12th year since our first date. We've been together for a long time and I can say that it's been very smooth throughout those 10 years. As we kid "No ups and downs, just ups and really big ups mainly."

To those reading this who aren't married -- bide your time. Finding the right person may take time. Both my wife and I had our share of pain and heart ache before we met each other. But because we waited until we found the right person we both benefit each day (mainly me but I normally keep the toilet seat down so I think that evens things out...).

Wired has put together a list of hyped products that were supposed to come out last year but didn't...

Richard Gephardt's presidential hopes seem to be coming to an end. I would blame much of that on his poor understanding of the electorate. There's a saying in politics, "It's all about the numbers." Gephardt, who kept claiming polls don't mattered, should have realized that polls do matter and only sounded desperate when trying to deny this reality.

But you have to give him credit, he truly seemed to believe that polls don't matter. Like I said, he just doesn't seem to understand the electorate in raw numbers. Nothing spoke more of that than his advertisements in the final days that basically went like this:

1) I will raise your taxes.

2) I will take that money and give it to a relatively small percentage of adults, who, by the way, rarely vote in elections anyway.

That was the basic message in his ads. "I'll repeal the Bush tax cuts and use that money to ensure health care for everyone." Guess what, Mr. Gephardt, most people have insurance already. Yes, somewhere between 30 million and 40 million Americans don't have health insurance. Most of them are children, however. Moreover, those people are disproportionately in urban-centric states (i.e. not Iowa).  It was the wrong message in the wrong place for the wrong people and it cost him.

That isn't to say that universal health-care is a loser of an issue. Just that it was a poor choice to talk about raising taxes to pay for it in a state where relatively few people would benefit.  People who vote tend to pay taxes and have insurance. So telling them you want to raise their taxes and provide them nothing in return isn't likely to resonate.

It's all about the numbers, Mr. Gephardt.

It's going to be close in Iowa. According to Zogby, it's a dead-heat with John Kerry taking a slight lead.

But most people don't realize how the Iowa Caucus works. It's not a straight vote.  It's really a series of meetings to pick delegates.

Each precinct has a different number of delegates to pick based on the number of registered democrats in that precinct.

And the rule is that a candidate must get 15% of the delegates to be viable. So let's say there are 10 delegates available at a given precinct. Let's say the vote was based on the current poll. It would work out something like this:

• Kerry would get 2
• Dean would get 2
• Edwards would get 2
• Gephardt would get 2

The others would be sharing 4 delegates. This is where things get interesting.

At that point, representatives from the top 4 would try to get those people who voted for "unviable" candidates to switch their vote to one of the above 4.

So in a race this close, you can't really tell who is going to come out the winner because it's not just a matter of the polls being inaccurate by a few percent, it's that the polls have not included who the second-choice would be for most of those candidates.

What would have been helpful would be to know who Clark voters would choose as their second favorite candidate, for example.

So who comes out on top could be very surprising. This is where having a good "on the ground" campaign network really matters. Incidentally, this sort of behavior will be modeled in The Political Machine strategy game.

 

The multiplayer features in the game are coming along nicely!