IconFactory is MacCentric so the contests were based on 3 Mac categories:

MacOS X category (icons for MacOS X)
The winner here was Invading your space by David Lanham

CandyBar Category (CandyBar is a program that changes toolbar icons).
The winner here was Think Natural by Christophe Bouchard

And the Classic MacOS Category.
where the winner was My Neighbor Baby by Michelle Chan

Visit http://www.iconfactory.com/pixelpal1.asp to get a history of it.

WinCustomize's own Paul Boyer (Mormegil) had a candy bar entry.

You can see all the entries by going here:
http://www.iconfactory.com/pp_listing.asp?category=CB

I'm a cranky guy. Damn cranky.

And one thing that is making me really cranky is that people will make an intelligent post only to see it hijacked by people and turn it into something completely unrelated to what the original topic was about.

I've seen this trend growing lately and it is going to stop now. I don't care how long you've been around the community. If there is a conversation on say designing wallpapers and you turn it into a discussion about third party Photoshop filters, you stand the risk of losing your posting priviledges. If there is a post discussing the finer points of stock portfolios and you turn it into a tirade about Enron, you stand the risk of losing your posting access.

And that obviously goes for posts that are about somethign relevant that turn into cutesy quasi-private conversations between people inside of posts.

And if you want to discuss something, make a post. You can post about pretty much anything you want here in the sense that you can create your own thread. But don't hijack other people's threads. It's rude and it's unnecessary.

We will be adding a host of new forum features to help make having discussions easier to participate in over the long haul. But in the meantime, let's show respect to those who create threads by not immediately turning it into a tangential discussion.

And yes, obviously at some point in a long conversation you will have topic drift. But if you're on post 5 on a thread about HDTV standards, it's not cool to start posting about whether Burger King's Fries are better than McDonalds. Because 1) They're not and 2) it's off topic.

SkinStudio is a program that lets you create your own visual styles for Windows. Using WindowBlinds, these visual styles can change your entire Windows user interface.

So what is new with SkinStudio version 3? This information guide will walk you through some of the new features that make SkinStudio stand out from previous versions. Check it out.

A good week for WinCustomize Subscribers. Not only did the Kryptonite suit come out:

https://www.stardock.net/people/martin/krypton/krypt2.jpg

But the long awaited massive update to the WinCustomize browser also came out which has tons of fixes and tweaks in it.

If you want to become a WinCustomize subscriber, go here: https://www.wincustomize.com/store/

WinCustomize subscribers get premium bandwidth access, unlimited downloads, at least 2 premium themes, and of course the WinCustomize browser. And the subscription lasts TWO years.

It's a bit amateur (okay a LOT amateur) and the sound has to be turned up but here's our first try at trying to demo something. In the coming weeks we hope to start getting video demos of making skins, using skinnable software, etc.

This video demo shows off how Stardock Central works with Galactic Civilizations. You can find out about GalCiv at www.galciv.com (https://www.galciv.com).

As some of you know, I have a site I blog on (https://www.joeuser.com).

One of my other favorite sites, deviantART has a neat feature where your personal page is actually somethingl like frogboy2.deviantart.com.

I was wondering what people thought about having a more enhanced system here that is similar to what is on dA but perhaps targeting more features on blogging, writing tutorials and including handy things for creating a real home page.

A lot of sites let you create a home page. So to make this worthwhile, we'd want to make it so that you can really include a lot of stuff on this. You wouldn't be editing HTML, instead we would try to provide you with the ability to put up the kinds of things you want there.

Anyway, this would be some effort so I wanted to hear fro you guys as to whether you'd like to see that or not.

If you're married or dating, how did you meet them?

I met my wife back in 1992. We had two Electrical Engineering classes together and a EE lab. In the lab, I accidentally started a fire due to some...mistakes with my circuit. This got her attention.

Soon after we started studying together and became friends. A few weeks later, my roommate in college told me he was going to be moving in with an old friend of his who was transferring which meant I needed to find a place to live. But it was so late in the semester that it was looking like I'd end up being in a dorm room with some random freshman which I didn't want.

My friend (Debbie who would become my wife) said that she and her 3 friends (all girls) were renting a house next year and were looking for a 5th person. I'm a guy. LIve with 4 girls? Sure!

Eventually we got engaged and got married in 1994 and lived happily ever after.

It's the year 2013...

What do you imagine computers, or whatever the equivalent is, being like?

Okay, everyone who's been getting mad, upset, or whatever, please listen up.

1) This forum is for the discussion of skinning and skinning issues. Users can certainly about pretty much anything they like. However, thread hijacking (that is, going into a thread and making completely off topic posts over an dover) is prohibited.

2) Let's try to be NICE to one another. This site is overwhelmingly populated by adults. Let's treat one another with respect and kindness okay? If someone doesn't agree with you, debate is certainly encouraged to a degree. But at a certain point, if you're starting to get angry about it, you know it's time to back off. Whether it be politics or religion or whatever, it's not like any of us are overlords of the universe who get to set universal policy.

3) Melodrama. One of the things I've seen lately is an increase in melodramatic behavior. The forum shouldn't be used as an outlet for one's psychosis or histrionics. If someone wants to create a thread about something completely off the wall, that's fine. But personal emotional melodrama getting interjected into other people's topics must cease now.

I will not be exiling people for violating this. Instead, I will be setting people's access to visitor which essentially removes their ability to post.

Let's get back to talking about fun, interesting stuff in the world of skinning, customziation, computers, technology, whatever okay?

Thanks!

Brad Wardell
CEO of Stardock & WinCustomize

Like many if not most people these days, I have an inkjet at home. And they sure are cool for printing out color photos and such. My Epson S900 is a great inkjet printer and for those doing color stuff, I highly recommend it.

But like many people, I feel like I'm a slave to the printer. I mean, the thing has like a dozen different ink cartridges that are always running out of ink so that half the time I can't really print.

These days, I print a lot of documents. Source code to review, articles, code journals, long threads here on WinCustomize, etc. I actually don't like reading stuff on the screen. Don't get me wrong, I'm not cranking out tons of printed materials or anything. But I probably print 4 or 5 pages per day (which I do recycle) and the inket just doesn't cut it for that over the long haul.

So I decided to get a nice quick, inexpensive personal laser printer. And I ended up going with the Dell P1500. It's basically a Lexmark personal laser printer rebranded. For $290, it's a great little laser printer.

First off, it's fast. 19 pages per minute. 1200DPI.

But also important, it's a breeze to set up. I've still not opened the manual. I literally took it out of the box, took off the various stickers, and plugged it into a free USB port and printed out a blog entry from one of the sites I frequent. Worked like a charm.

Now, don't get me wrong, there's nothing high tech about this printer. There are probably better bang for the buck printers out there. But for people like me who just want to a reasonably cheap easy to get going laser printer for printing out docs, so far, this thing looks pretty good.