When Skinz.org was having problems with eFront, I asked Migellito to go over and download all of the WindowBlinds, DesktopX, and Icon Packages for backup just in case something happened to eFront.

Well, as it turned out, they went down along with the database. But now we have this CD full of skins. Obviously we can't put them up. But if anyone lost their skins from the skinz.org classic days, you can post here and I can see about making them available in some fashion for authors to retrieve their work.

https://www.wincustomize.com/index.asp?Cmd=full&NewsID=1149

HIghly recommend reading this interesting discussion.

A new version of IconPackager is available. IconPackager is a program that allows you to apply a "package" of icons to change all of standard Windows icons to something new.

The new version of IconPackager includes an icon explorer for finding icons in DLLs, EXEs, and ICLs as well as fixes a host of problems that were in the shareware version.

We've had a lot of interesting discussions regarding subscriptions and the like.

How many of you have gotten spammed by Classmates.com? I get a ton of email from them. For those of you not familiar with them, they basically have a site in which you can sign up and fin dother people from your graduating class.

Now, where in our community we've seen people complain because WinCustomize puts a 100 megabyte cap on people who don't participate on the site or register the software they're using. Classmates.com asks for users to pay $36 per YEAR ($3 per month) to do anything on the site. You can't even create a bio or email other people in your class or anything. It's basically totally crippled.

Whereas a WinCustomize subscription is optional and only 80 cents per month and comes with additional goodies like the skin browser, premium skin suites, etc. Classmates gives you nothing but access to the data other people have entered. They are, in other words, purely selling content that they don't create. Their bandwidth costs are probably fairly insignificant since users don't download anything, it's jsut server low bandwidth pages.

The problem I have with classmates is that they ruin it for everyone else who is trying to advocates subscriptions as a reasonable mechanism for sites to pay the bills. Like many things, "how much is too much" is a matter of thresholds. I believe the charging of 3 bucks per month in order to give me the priviledge of submitting more info and viewing info of my classmates passes the threshold of reasonableness.

Imagine if WinCustomize operated like that:

At a certain date it stopped allowing skin authors to submit new skins or updated skins without paying $3 per month. Prevented them from deleting the skins they already included. Prevented them as well as all users from downloading skins.

Pretty terrible I think. I suspect that the market is doing its job and Classmates isn't raking in nearly as much income as they might if they were being reasonable. The problem is, as I mentioned, the black eye it gives to subscription concepts of other sites. A site like Classmates.com really gives people a real live nightmare scenario of how the web could go.

Hopefully some people have noticed that WinCustomize is considerably faster this week than previously. We added another 10 megabits of bandwidth to the site.

A special thanks to those of you who have purchased WinCustomize subscriptions for it was they that made it possible to afford the additional bandwidth. Give yourselves a pat on the back.

The reason users are here does not necessarily coincide with what's available here.

That is, even with heavy moderation (only the best of the best wallpapers are allowed) there are more wallpapers here than any other library.

But only 11% of users said they are here primarily for the wallpapers.

Contract that with 30% of users being here for WindowBlinds skins.

Hardly anyone comes here mainly for the message boards which is a bit of a shame since there are so many good discussions on it.

Then again, 42% of users said they come here for multiple reasons such as downloading WindowBlinds skins, wallpapers, DesktopX themes and the message boards.

Incidentally, DesktopX had a pretty impressive showing with nearly 10% of respondants saying they come here mainly just for DesktopX stuff.

This is always a very tough issue for the moderators of WinCustomize because no one enjoys rejecting the hard work of graphics designers and other artists.

But we want to make sure the site stays focused as a skin site first and doesn't end up flooded with wallpaper. So we're starting to become increasingly pickier on what wallpapers end up on the site.

We generally focus on wallpapers that work as wallpapers (as opposed to just being artistically nice). On top of that, unique-ness helps. Using Bryce to create a landscape is very unlikely to make it up on the site for instance.

I just wanted to write this up so that there are no hard feelings on this.

So Napster appears to be about to move from Chapter 11 to Chapter 7 liquidation.

During the ealry days of our news group, Napster was a pretty hot topic as people debated their business model, business ethics, and the record industry ethics.

I'm on fan of the record industry but I think many of us who are in the business of CREATING intellectual property can breath a sigh of relief to see that Napster died. Part of the reason for that (a big reason) was the very idea that people could get rich by allowing others to pilfer the work of others.

Early Object Desktop users may recall the discussion of Object Recommendation, which preceded Napster by a year. This component allowed users to select folders on their hard drive as well as links on the net" to "recommend" to others. These files were then available as part of a global file database. Why did we kill it? Because we couldn't figure out how to prevent people from using it to pirate software and music. An ethical dilema that Shawn Fanning apparently did not worry about when he whipped up Napster in MFC a year later and went on to win various "technology of the year awards" to the dismay of software develoeprs everywhere who had been discussing peer file networks for years but were prevented from creating open ones due to moral/ethics issues involved.

So while there is definitely a bit of a sour grapes feeling among some of us that someone could gain international fame as a "brilliant" software developer simply by having no moral qualms over IP theft, at least in the end there seems to be justice - that you can't necessarily make a long term business out of creating things designed mainly so that others to steal the work of others easily.

(flame away)

There is a huge variety of cusotmization options out there now. Thousands and thousands of skins. But even now, the most common thing to be found on a "skinning" site is typically a wallpaper.

On every major Windows customization site wallpapers were the most common. Even here where they are moderated heavily.

What is interesting is that different sites have successfully catered to different groups of users.

Here are the stats (rough estimates)

Skinbase
Skins: ~3300
Walls: 2038
Other: ~200
Wall to skin ratio: 0.6 walls to every skin

WinCustomize
Skins: ~6150
Walls: 2129
Other: ~750
Wall to skin ratio: 0.34

deviantART
Skins: ~11,400
Walls: ~105,000
Other: ~433,300
Wall to skin ratio: 9.2 walls to every skin

DeskMod
Skins: ~2700
Walls: 6814
Other: ~2900
Wall to skin ratio: 2.5 walls for every skin

Dominant Skins:

deviantART: Winamp (24% of skins), WindowBlinds (7% of skins)

Skinbase: Winamp (9% of skins), WindowBlinds (9% of skins)

WinCustomize: WindowBlinds (31% of skins), DesktopX (23% of skins)

Deskmod: Winamp (25% of skins), WindowBlinds (4% of skins).

So on the 4 surveyed sites, WinAmp was the most popular skinnable program on 3 of them and WindowBlinds the second most populra on 3 of them. Not suprisingly on the 4th site (this one) WindowBlinds was #1 since this is the official site for it and DesktopX was #2 (also the official site for DesktopX).

I don't know what conclusions to draw from this other than the obvious fact that as popular as skins are, wallpapers really rule the day. I haven't done any work on looking at download counts yet to see what is the most popular with users but clearly we can see what's the most popular with artists.

LogonStudio RC 6 is now available. It's a program that lets you apply and create your own logon screens for Windows XP.

It uses the .logonXP format and can import logonui.exe files. .logonxp files are both smaller and safer (it's amazing that someone who wouldn't click on a .exe attachment in their email will happily replace their logonui.exe with one downloaded off the Internet).

Best of all - it's free! (www.logonstudio.com).