WinCustomize is now running on a new, more powerful server thousands of miles away from where WinCustomize has been running.

The site may look the same, but appearances are deceiving.  The data has been meticulously backed up and transferred in the background over the past several days.

That said, very likely there will be some problems in the next few days as we iron out things we missed. Stay tuned!

Seems like everyone is writing about the recall in California. It makes for an exciting story but the aftermath won't likely be nearly as exciting. You already hear the Democrats complaining about lack of polling places (apparently it was too much to have to fill out a ballot and mail it in for these people).

But here's some sobering realities: California is a mess. Why any business would locate itself in California is beyond me. If any state should have been chopped up into several states it's California. Its near monopoly of the west coast, particularly of the nicest parts, has allowed it to be much less competitive economically than other states and get away with it. Until now.

Businesses have been evacuating California en masse. High taxes. High regulation. A culture hostile towards business. High cost of livings. You'd think we were talking about France. Thankfully, there's no language barrier and people have been able to flee to other nearby states that are more on the ball than California.

So what is Arnold going to do? The state legislature is dominated by Democrats. How is he going to clean up the mess? Is he willing to cut regulation? Is he willing to chop benefits? Those will be tough things for the people of California to swallow. If the Terminator can't fix it, then we may indeed be getting a sneak preview of what our friends in Europe are in store for as their economies slowly grind to a halt due to massive taxation and social entitlements.

California at a glance:

 

San Francisco and the rest of the bay area obviously preferred to "stay the course" which I find amazing given that the high cost of doing business affects tech companies very acutely.

 

Sgt. Striker makes a pretty good case showing just how much the Germans have changed since 1939. He also mentions that Poland, rather than Germany, is now the center of martial prowess in continental Europe these days.

 

Here's Europe just before World War I (1914). The militaristic part of Germany was called Prussia.  Prussia is on the far east side of Germany there.

But after two world wars, Germany was split in two:

Now, if you look closely, you can see that East Germany doesn't really go that East. A good chunk of Prussia is now part of, you guessed it, Poland.

The question is, is Germany pacifistic because:

[A] The destruction caused by World War II and having been on the losing side of two world wars changed the culture?

[B] The culturally most militaristic part of Germany is no longer part of Germany?

[C] Two world wars killed off millions of Germans. The more militaristic you tended to be, the more likely you were to be killed in one of the two world wars. Hence, a form of natural selection.

Obviously, there is some "a bit of all 3" but it's probably not all 3 in equal parts. Which one is it mostly of?

 

 

At the risk of being an anti-populist (and worse), I'll be up front: I don't agree with universal suffrage.

There, I've said it. Go ahead, call me names. I'm a bad bad man.

But there's a reason for my view on this.  I don't believe that those who don't contribute to the treasury should be allowed to dictate what is done with that treasury to those who do.

Calor writes in "Why the left hates Bush" that Gore should have been President. If only a few voters in Florida had managed to figure out the ballot.

I have two stock answers to that:

(1) So what? Why should the votes of people who take serious time to consider who to vote for, pay a great deal in taxes, create jobs, contribute in many other ways be countered by some person who can't even be bothered to read the instructions on a ballot? And how many Democratic votes were picked up in the last election due to homeless people being bussed to the polling places? Or bribed with cigarettes.  In California they're going to allow anyone with a driver's license vote even if they're not a citizen. Terrific.  I don't really care that much what the "intent" of Floridians were. I only care about the legal result.  It's like in baseball. I don't care if the Yankees are the "better" team on paper. It's who wins the game that matters.

(2) They called Florida before the pan handle of the state had finished voting. Given how close it was, one has to wonder how many Bush votes were lost because of the early call (the pan handle of Florida is overwhelmingly Republican). Strangely, this didn't receive a lot of coverage. Of course he media isn't biased, right?

It is certainly easier and more tempting to argue for universal suffrage. After all, it sounds so noble. So ethical.  It's an easy trap to fall into.  But is it noble and ethical?

We live in a country where 40% of the adult population pays no federal taxes whatsoever. But all 40% of them can vote on what's done with the treasury. Think about that.  Many people today live in a home owner's association. We pay dues and as a group we vote on what to do with that money. But imagine living in a neighborhood of 100 homes where 40 of them don't pay a cent into the association but still got to vote:

"We want a neighborhood pool with all the trimmings!" says one. Instantly they have 40% of the votes in favor of that. A neighborhood pool sounds great. Good for the kids, fun in the summer, etc.

"But pools cost a lot of money to build and maintain." says one of the people who pays dues.

"Tough luck rich boy!"

And so they vote and it passes by a margin of 51 to 49 with all 40 of the non-payers voting in favor of the pool. Association dues go up 25% to pay for the pool but that means nothing to those who aren't paying.

The federal government, to a certain extent, operates on the same principle.  Hey, let's have prescription drugs. Sounds great. But 10% of the population is going to be stuck paying for 90% of the cost even though they don't benefit from it any more than the guy who pays zilch. In fact, they probably won't benefit at all because they usually have their own health care plan.

So when Calor and those who agree with him complain about how Gore lost despite having the "plurality" of votes, the right's answer is, so what? Personally, my interest is in what the "intent" of the people who live in a household that pays federal taxes think. And from working on The Political Machine and looking at the exit polling data, it's pretty clear how they voted -- Bush by a landslide. Gore got the vast majority of the lower 40% in income and Bush got a significant majority of the other 60% of the voter population.

So the left can whine all it wants about Bush and his so-called "unelected" back end. Because to many of us in the middle or on the right, particularly tax payers, Democrats increasingly are winning by pandering to the people who don't pay the bills. Or worse, pandering to people who aren't even citizens!

I'm not a big fan of Bush myself, I may not even vote for him in 2004. But he was elected in 2000 fair and square.

WinCustomize now supports .LSZ Litestep themes which newer versions of Litestep use for distributing themes.

Litestep is a freeware, open source replacement shell for Explorer. You can learn more about it by going to the Litestep section here on WinCustomize.

What is a skin site? A skin site is a kind of file download site.  The world's most popular download site, Download.com, is ranked 47th in the world by Alexa. The kind of bandwidth it must take to run that site is astronomical. Last week, the most popular file on Download.com received over 2.3 million downloads (Kazaa).  WinZip, the most popular ZIP manager, received 426,000 downloads.

Skin sites don't get anywhere near that kind of traffic. It specializes in files that are used to customize the look and feel of your computer. The more specialized you are, the smaller your user base is going to be.  A popular skin author in WinCustomize typically will see around 35,000 downloads of their skins in a given week.

Regardless of what you offer on your site to download, there are only 3 types of download sites:

1. Sites run as a hobby

2. Sites with a business model

3. Sites that disappear from lack of funds

If your site doesn't get immense traffic, you can run it much like the BBSes of old. As a rewarding, fun hobby. But a hobby. One that costs money out of pocket for the site's owner(s) to maintain.  Each owner has a threshold of pain. That is, how much money they can spend before it gets too expensive for them to maintain.

Typically, we've found that when a skin site reaches an Alexa ranking of 10,000 or better that it has crossed a threshold of where it needs to have a viable business model or it will be prohibitively expensive to keep going.

Here are the Alexa rankings of the 6 most popular sites for downloading skins, themes, walls, etc.

Before someone objects to me not listing Deskmod, that's because they don't currently host skins. And for good reason:

Here is Deskmod's ranking over the past year. As you can see, it was slowly moving up. But you can also see some dips due to down time in there. As it's rank edged towards 10,000th or better, the bandwidth costs passed that threshold of hobby and business. Without a business model that pays the bills, the costs are simply too high for individuals.

Based on the Alexa ranking, there are two art/skin sites that make good business cases because they have been in the top 10,000 websites for a long time with uninterrupted availability. That's deviantART and WinCustomize.

At the end of the day, someone has to pay the bills. This must come as quite a shock to the people who think the Internet "should be free" but running a website can get quite expensive. That is, tens of thousands of dollars per month expensive. So how do they do it? Here is the basic model for an art/skin site:

 

All 3 groups need one another.

deviantART and WinCustomize focus on attracting different groups (which means technically they don't compete).  deviantART focuses on making the site a haven for artists/skinners who in turn attract users. WinCustomize focuses on users which in turn attracts skinners/artists. But in both cases, who visits the site is important.

On WinCustomize, the type of user matters. That's because the site pays for itself through selling of WinCustomize subscriptions and software via its store. There are basically two types of users: Contributors and non-contributors.  Contributors are the people who either create content for the site (skins, themes, icons, tutorials, walls, etc.) or register some of the programs they use /  purchase a subscription to the site.  Non-contributors, are users who simply download the stuff.

At a certain point, it's up to the website to create an avenue for people to become contributors. If you don't have something reasonably compelling or attainable for a user, they won't become a contributor.  Either way, if a site has too few contributors as a percentage, it will eventually die.

Freeware vs. Commercialware

WinCustomize gets tons of requests for new sections on the site. But few people put much thought into "how does this help the site?"  The worst case scenario for a site like WinCustomize is to put up a section for a program that doesn't bring in many new users but increases the consumption rate of non-contributors. That's why WinCustomize is biased for commercial software. The users of those programs are much more likely to be willing to become contributors in some way.

The last thing a site wants is to be overrun by militant "everything should be free" people who consume the bandwidth and give nothing in return. Applications that attract those kinds of users are what we call "bad citizens".

So what makes an application a "good citizen"?

Here's a list:

1. Be available on mainstream download sites. Skin sites like WinCustomize want mainstream users. That means making your program available on Download.com, Tucows, Betanews's File Forum, etc. If your program is on some obscure home page, it's not going to have a large user base.

2. Promote the heck out of those who support you. Especially if you're a freeware program. That means links to the major skin sites on your home page. Not buried but very apparent. When you install your program, include links to those sites supporting you.

3. Encourage the skinners of your program to upload to the sites that support your app.

What it boils down to is understanding the basic model for a skin site. Skin sites need users and content. They need people who will contribute to the site (either content or through purchases of products and services).  Recognizing these basic economic realities is a good start to understanding how skin sites stay alive over the long term.

So what's involved in running a sustainable popular skinning site? This article goes over why websites like WinCustomize do what they do.

What is a skin site? A skin site is a kind of file download site.  The world's most popular download site, Download.com, is ranked 47th in the world by Alexa. The kind of bandwidth it must take to run that site is astronomical. Last week, the most popular file on Download.com received over 2.3 million downloads (Kazaa).  WinZip, the most popular ZIP manager, received 426,000 downloads.

Skin sites don't get anywhere near that kind of traffic. It specializes in files that are used to customize the look and feel of your computer. The more specialized you are, the smaller your user base is going to be.  A popular skin author in WinCustomize typically will see around 35,000 downloads of their skins in a given week.

Regardless of what you offer on your site to download, there are only 3 types of download sites:

1. Sites run as a hobby

2. Sites with a business model

3. Sites that disappear from lack of funds

If your site doesn't get immense traffic, you can run it much like the BBSes of old. As a rewarding, fun hobby. But a hobby. One that costs money out of pocket for the site's owner(s) to maintain.  Each owner has a threshold of pain. That is, how much money they can spend before it gets too expensive for them to maintain.

Typically, we've found that when a skin site reaches an Alexa ranking of 10,000 or better that it has crossed a threshold of where it needs to have a viable business model or it will be prohibitively expensive to keep going.

Here are the Alexa rankings of the 6 most popular sites for downloading skins, themes, walls, etc.

Before someone objects to me not listing Deskmod, that's because they don't currently host skins. And for good reason:

Here is Deskmod's ranking over the past year. As you can see, it was slowly moving up. But you can also see some dips due to down time in there. As it's rank edged towards 10,000th or better, the bandwidth costs passed that threshold of hobby and business. Without a business model that pays the bills, the costs are simply too high for individuals.

Based on the Alexa ranking, there are two art/skin sites that make good business cases because they have been in the top 10,000 websites for a long time with uninterrupted availability. That's deviantART and WinCustomize.

At the end of the day, someone has to pay the bills. This must come as quite a shock to the people who think the Internet "should be free" but running a website can get quite expensive. That is, tens of thousands of dollars per month expensive. So how do they do it? Here is the basic model for an art/skin site:

 

All 3 groups need one another.

deviantART and WinCustomize focus on attracting different groups (which means technically they don't compete).  deviantART focuses on making the site a haven for artists/skinners who in turn attract users. WinCustomize focuses on users which in turn attracts skinners/artists. But in both cases, who visits the site is important.

On WinCustomize, the type of user matters. That's because the site pays for itself through selling of WinCustomize subscriptions and software via its store. There are basically two types of users: Contributors and non-contributors.  Contributors are the people who either create content for the site (skins, themes, icons, tutorials, walls, etc.) or register some of the programs they use /  purchase a subscription to the site.  Non-contributors, are users who simply download the stuff.

At a certain point, it's up to the website to create an avenue for people to become contributors. If you don't have something reasonably compelling or attainable for a user, they won't become a contributor.  Either way, if a site has too few contributors as a percentage, it will eventually die.

Freeware vs. Commercialware

WinCustomize gets tons of requests for new sections on the site. But few people put much thought into "how does this help the site?"  The worst case scenario for a site like WinCustomize is to put up a section for a program that doesn't bring in many new users but increases the consumption rate of non-contributors. That's why WinCustomize is biased for commercial software. The users of those programs are much more likely to be willing to become contributors in some way.

The last thing a site wants is to be overrun by militant "everything should be free" people who consume the bandwidth and give nothing in return. Applications that attract those kinds of users are what we call "bad citizens".

So what makes an application a "good citizen"?

Here's a list:

1. Be available on mainstream download sites. Skin sites like WinCustomize want mainstream users. That means making your program available on Download.com, Tucows, Betanews's File Forum, etc. If your program is on some obscure home page, it's not going to have a large user base.

2. Promote the heck out of those who support you. Especially if you're a freeware program. That means links to the major skin sites on your home page. Not buried but very apparent. When you install your program, include links to those sites supporting you.

3. Encourage the skinners of your program to upload to the sites that support your app.

What it boils down to is understanding the basic model for a skin site. Skin sites need users and content. They need people who will contribute to the site (either content or through purchases of products and services).  Recognizing these basic economic realities is a good start to understanding how skin sites stay alive over the long term.

Thanks to programs like yZ Dock and ObjectDock there are now a TON of .PNG files easily accessible.

Personally, I still find myself going to Google, clicking on the Image tab and then typing what I want followed by a .PNG to list only PNG files.

With Halloween approaching, I'm getting a lot of email from people asking how they can decorate their desktops. Probably the quickest, easiest way to do neat stuff isn't to go to a skin site at all but rather to just do it yourself with PNGs.

Here's how:

1) (Plug Alert, I work for Stardock): Get DesktopX. It's been really hard to explain what this thing does because it does so much. But one of the basic things it can do is put PNG files on your desktop that are effectively free form icons. You can get it for free at http://www.desktopx.net

2) Once you have it installed, right click on its system tray icon and choose "New object"


3) When you do that you'll have a generic looking "object" on your desktop:


4) Now, right click on that object and go to properties. Just like you would for an icon, you can change the appearance of an object.


5) Now just find a .PNG you want to have on your desktop.


6) And then click "apply"


Final result:

 

I regularly get asked "So what exactly is WindowBlinds?" or "Why would I use WindowBlinds?"  So here's the marketing stuff all together.

Info & Requirements

Developed by: Stardock Corp. (www.stardock.com)
Price: Trial version is free for unlimited time. Enhanced version is $19.95. Can also be purchased as part of Object Desktop suite ($49.95).
OS Requirements: Windows XP or Windows 2000. Windows 98Draginol versions coming soon.
Home Page: http://www.windowblinds.net
More Skins Available at: WinCustomize.com, deviantART, LotsOfSkins, SkinBase, XPThemes.com

Introduction

WindowBlinds is a program that that enables Windows users to completely change the look and feel of the Windows user interface. Windows XP comes with the ability to change its "visual style" between blue, silver, and green as well as switching to "classic" mode. WindowBlinds is the Microsoft certified way of extending Windows XP to support additional "visual styles". WindowBlinds visual styles can change virtually every aspect of the Windows graphical user interface (GUI) such as title bars, push buttons, radio buttons, the Start bar, menus, tool bars, the task pane, dialog backgrounds, and much more. It also adds additional features to the Windows operating system such as roll-up buttons, always on top buttons, URL links, MP3 players, user control over how double clicking and right clicking on the title bar will behave, and many other functionality enhancements. And WindowBlinds 4 is able to do all this while actually increasing the performance of the Windows GUI. WindowBlinds 4 accelerates the Windows user interface both in terms of productivity gains and raw performance. Additionally, it optimizes visual styles on the fly such that they use less memory than the included Windows XP visual styles.

WindowBlinds is part of Stardock's Object Desktop suite of desktop extensions. It is also available stand alone at WindowBlinds.net.
 

So what's the big deal about WindowBlinds version 4 over the previous versions?

People who have used older versions of WindowBlinds may not realize just how much tricky programming had to be done to get it to work at all. Imagine this -- one program that had to run on Windows 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000 and XP. That means WindowBlinds 3 had to work with the "lowest common denominator".

For WindowBlinds 4, Windows XP was the targeted platform. In fact, upon release, it only worked on Windows XP. This allowed Stardock to concentrate on taking advantage of all the goodies in Microsoft's new XP APIs. APIs that the included "uxtheme.dll" don't make full use of.

• msstyles are not hardware accelerated. WindowBlinds are.
   
• msstyles don't make any attempt to avoid duplicate painting of the same thing. WindowBlinds 4 includes "smart painting" which throws out duplicate paint messages. This means that WindowBlinds skins tend to size faster and overall use less CPU when being repainted because they aren't repainted as much.
   
• WindowBlinds interacts directly with shellstyles (the task panel). Programs like Style XP and uxtheme patchers require you to actually *replace* your shellstyles.dll with a hacked one.
   
• WindowBlinds makes use of the same compatibility APIs as msstyles do. WB users can switch into "skin only theme aware applications" and enjoy equal compatibility as msstyles does. Or they can disable that and skin virtually all apps (nearly all non theme aware programs work fine too and problematic ones can be excluded).
   
• WindowBlinds 4 can skin the command prompt. Msstyles can't.

In other words, WindowBlinds 4 behaves more natively than uxtheme does. This is mostly due to timing. Stardock had a year to work with the released version of Windows XP to learn all the new developer features. Whereas uxtheme was developed at the same time as XP and hence didn't have as much time (or incentive) to add in these kinds of features.

Many new users confuse "bundling" with native. Uxtheme.dll is no more part of Windows XP than WBlind.dll. The difference is that when you install Windows XP, this DLL is installed by default. It is worth knowing that one can turn this off completely by disabling the theme service. One of those big svchost.exe processes is actually the theme service. And uxtheme.dll gets attached to every process on your system because it, like WindowBlinds, uses system hooks.
 

The Features
 

The big features of WindowBlinds 4 include:

• Full Skinning of the Windows XP UI. Uxtheme only skins parts of the XP OS and at that only "theme aware" parts. This means parts of the OS look like Windows 95 and parts look like XP and other parts just aren't changed at all.
  
  Compare: Windows XP on its own vs. With WindowBlinds
  
  This also means WindowBlinds skins things like the logon/logoff dialogs, please wait dialogs, and other dialogs not touched by msstyles. In WindowBlinds 4.2, toolbar skinning and the copy, move, delete and other animated images will be skinnable too.
   
• Productive Features such as being able to set what mouse clicks do to the title bar. You could have right click on the title bar minimize a window for instance. You can add more buttons to the title bar such as roll-up, minimize to system tray, always on top, etc. You can put clocks, stock tickers, weather info, etc. into the title bar or anywhere else for that matter.
   
• Free Form Skinning. Msstyles tend to look similar because their borders must be 4 pixels with title bar buttons in set spots. It's more about replacing existing bitmaps with new one than what has traditionally been called skinning. In WindowBlinds, buttons can be placed anywhere, borders, title bars, etc. be any size or shape. As a result, there are visual styles for WindowBlinds that look quite crazy. It is this free form nature that had led companies such as Microsoft themselves to Warner Bros, Touchstone Pictures, Bell South, Nintendo, ATI, nVidia, and many many others to license WindowBlinds for their own use.
   
• Colorizing. You can change the color of your visual styles to any color you want. You can even change the gamma or invert the colors entirely -- on the fly.
   
• You can assign different visual styles to different programs.

Trying WindowBlinds for yourself

You can try WindowBlinds for yourself. It is the world's most popular desktop enhancement with over 6 MILLION downloads at Download.com on its own. It has nearly 2,500 different visual styles on WinCustomize.com alone and more visual styles are made all the time.

Version 4.2 will work on Windows XP, 2000, ME, and 98 and is due out in November.