Four years ago these are the sections on Skinz.org along with the # of skins in that section.

eFX: 173
EGN: 17
Half-Life: 23
K-Jofol: 14
LS Mods: 3
MPFree: 7
MyPad: 9
NeoPlanet: 23
PalmOS Emu: 11
QCD: 23
WindowBlinds: 18
WinAmp: 156
WPlay: 5

Some of these apps I'm not very sure about. Obviously Half-life isn't a skinnable app.

From top to bottom:
eFX was developed by Thirty4. They halted development after signing up with a company called Akamai (http://www.akamaidesign.com/). But nothing further ever was publicly released beyond 0.40 in 1999.

I'm not completely sure what EGN was. But you can find out more about it here (http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Sector/2995/index.html).

K-Jfol was a skinnable MP3 player that was bought out by Winamp. Its technology is thought to have served as the basis for Winamp 3.

Litestep Mods continue to be developed with themes available here at WinCustomize as well as at www.litestep.com

MPFree was another skinnable MP3 player. It has a section over at deviantART http://www.deviantart.com/browse/t/skin/mpfree/.

MyPad was a skinnable text editor. You can find its section at deviantART here: http://www.deviantart.com/thumbnails.php?section=mypad

Neoplanet was a skinnable web browser. It was actually one of those dot-com companies that saw skinning at the pathway to immense popularity. Unfortunately they were a bit too far ahead of the curve. At one point, Neoplanet had something like 60+ employees. It provided a Lord of the Rings web browser as well as an Austin Powers web browser. When the dot-com crash came, they were one of the early casaulties. You can still download their program at www.neoplanet.com (http://www.neoplanet.com).

QCD was another MP3 player. It is still updated on a regular basis.(http://www.quinnware.com/news.html). The most recent release being only a couple days old. It looks pretty impressive too (http://images.deviantart.com/large/skin/qcd/BetaMaxx.jpg).

WindowBlinds has grown in popularity over the years helping to make Stardock a significant player in the customization community. In 1999, the company was struggling in its transition from OS/2 to Windows. Stardock was in the process of creating Object Desktop for Windows and having a difficult time with the "enhanced look" component of Object Desktop. Eventually Stardock teamed up with Neil Banfield who was independently working on something similar. By combining knowledge and technology, WindowBlinds took off and now has over 2000 skins. You can find out more at http://www.windowblinds.net

Winamp has also seen its popularity grow. Originally a shareware program, it was bought out by AOL for millions of dollars. It has grown so popular as an MP3 player that even with Microsoft's efforts to dominate the media playing market, Winamp is still able to hold its own. Its third generation version incorporates very flexible skinning that supports alpha blending. You can find out more at http://www.winamp.com

WPlay, on the other hand, doesn't seem to have survived. It was a $10 shareware program that had to compete against free programs from much larger providers. It had some great skinning technology that was arguably ahead of its time. But with so many MP3 players, it was inevitable that some wouldn't make it.

So there you have it. A time machine trip back 4 years ago to the dawn of modern skinning. Back then, people didn't use graphics packages. We made skins using punch cards and each skin had only 4 colors of course... how things have changed!

You know, before I had kids, I never got sick. I had perfect attendance (other than chicken pox) in K through 12. But now with kids, blech. I'm not sure I ever even had the flu before having kids.

Anyone else out there suffering from the same thing? Seems like everyone I know is getting the flu. Thankfully, I have just the good old fashioned flu and intestinal or whatever but it is definitely a downer.

Screenshot of Toon-XP:
https://www.stardock.com/products/themes/toon-xp/odnt-toon2.jpg

VIDEO demo of Toon-XP:
https://www.stardock.com/videos/toon-xp.wmv

If you combined the talents of Paul Boyer & Pixtudio together to create the ultimate suite, what would it look like?

Probably something like the new Toon-XP Premium suite! This new suite includes a new visual style created by Pixtudio that has multiple sub-designs and can be colored to any color you'd like, but also supports the new WindowBlinds 4 features such as skinnable Explorer task panes, logon/logoff screens, and much more.

The desktop theme is created by Paul Boyer and supplies a wharf on the right and a cool resource monitoring piece at the top.

The right click desktop menu is replaced with one that is faster and has a link to your most frequently used programs.

And of course, it also includes a ton of excellent icons by Paul Boyer (maker of the Orion icon suites). Each icon supports alpha blending and has resolutions from 16x16 all the way up to 128x128 which makes them ideal for programs like ObjectDock.

And you can pick and choose which pieces you want to use. Only want to use the skin? No problem. Worried that you don't have the software you need installed? No problem, the suite includes a mini-program called ThemeManager which includes the pieces to each program you need to apply the theme. So even if you don't have a given part installed, Toon-XP will automatically take care of it for you upon installation.

To get Toon-XP go to: https://www.stardock.com/products/themes/toon-xp

The official announcement is tomorrow but for your enjoyment...

https://www.stardock.com/products/themes/toon-xp/

T-man's changes to the database handling should have a pretty significant impact at the speed of the message boards. Do the message boards seem faster?

For the past day and a half the WinCustomize libraries were down for maintainence. The SQL servers have just been so maxed out by the increase in traffic that the site wasn't able to respond adequately.

We used the time to optimize the SQL accesses. This morning, T-man was able to re-implement the way user data is accessed in a way that is far less intensive and as a result we can turn on the libraries again.

In the long term, we will still need to purchase an additional server but the rewrite up the SQL accessing should (hopefully) show a significant improvement in speed. We aplogize for the inconvenience.

Next week users of Object Desktop (www.objectdesktop.com) will be getting the first ALPHA of WindowBlinds 4.

The full preview guide of WindowBlinds 4 is here:
http://www.windowblinds.net/wb4

Major new features of WindowBlinds 4 are:

* Much faster than WindowBlinds 3 or Windows XP's own built in visual styles
* Higher level of compatibility with wacky applications that do non-standard things.
* Skins more elements of Windows including the Explorer task panel (shellstyles) WITHOUT requiring any hacking of shellstyle DLL.
* Can skin new elements like log off screens and other parts that one might not imagine.
* Plus it skins a host of other things users have long asked for.

WindowBlinds 4 will be the most significant engine upgrade to WindowBlinds since the original 1.0. Faster, smaller, more features.

The epic of running a skin site is always about the race between three resources: 1) Bandwidth 2) CPU resouces for handling scripts 3) CPU resources for handling the database Occasionally you'll see the notice of an upgrade to one of these three things. At the beginning of last year, WinCustomize was hosted on around 15 megabits (equivalent of ten T1 lines). Today, it requires 35 megabits of bandwidth. But we're okay on bandwidth, we've done the upgrading there. Thanks to subscribers and Stardock customers. But then we ran out of CPU resources for scripts. That was last Fall. We got a new mega server and things improved allowing even more people onto the site. And that brings us to now. so now the machines that handle the SQL database stuff are stuffed. We're working on a solution to this. But as many have noticed, the site has become incredibly slow due to the literally millions of people trying to access the site. While we could close the libraries for everyone (which is what most sites end up doing in this situation) we have decided that we can keep the libraries open for Stardock customers (make sure you cross-reference your accounts), WinCustomize subscribers, and user swith above citizen access (i.e. skin authors and other contributors). These peopel are, after all, the ones who pay for the hardware upgrades needed to keep the site going on a day to day basis. We expect this situation to be temporary (i.e. a couple of days). If you click on one of the sections on the left and get the library closed message, you can eitehr cross reference your account if you're already a customer or subscriber or you can become a subscriber. Alternatively, you can also gain access by buying Object Desktop and then cross referencing your account then. We apologize for the inconvenience.

The SQL server is pretty maxed out which makes it very hard to do monthly maintainence. So we've closed the skins library to all non-apprentice / non-WC subscriber users to reduce the load.

We expect things to return to normal in a cople of days.