We have merged the WindowBlinds, WinXP, and GUI Olympics visual styles all into the WindowBlinds section to clean up the site a little bit.

If you are looking for WB visual styles, just look in the WindowBlinds section.

Here's another sneak peek for those of you who plan on supporting WinCustomize by becoming a premium subscriber. The skin browser - WinCustomize.exe ties directly into the WinCustomize database.

Join the discussion on the 10 tech products you couldn't do without.

So what are 10 technology related products you don't think you could do without?

1) TIVO.
This has really changed the way I watch TV and my life in general. Here's why: No longer does the TV times dictate my schedule in the slightest bit. I do what I need to do or want to do when I want/need to do it. When there's free time, then I can go to my Tivo.

2) Broadband Internet connection.
I'm typing this to you from my home in my sweats. I'm communicating with the Stardock team via instant messaging and IRC chat. It has allowed a small company like us to have developers in many different countries (our new product, SkinStudio XP was developed in Poland, England, and USA for instance - no way 10 years ago coudl a small company like us do that without Broadband).

3) Wireless home networking. I can communicate with people from my laptop out on my deck. Talk about a major improvement in life quality. Being able to sit out on an early morning listening to the birds, watching the rabbits and whatever in the woods while doing work on the laptop. It's incredible.

4) Xerox Phaser 850 color printer. This thing is just incredible. You can have your wimpy inkjet. This thing uses wax (which is really cool, when you're runnng low you just drop a hunk of wax of the color it needs in). It cranks out several pages per minute and the quality is always excellent.

5) Object Desktop. Yea, this is a plug but it's true. When I have to use a computer that doesn't have it installed, it's a pain because of all the tweaks and productivity and UI enhancements it provivdes.

6) Phone to Electrical outlet converter. I can't wire anything for the life of me (ironic since I'm an Electrical Engineer). But with this thing, I can plug it into the wall adn then plug a phone line into it and then ANY electrical outlet that has the converter can be a phone line. Made it much easier to hook up the Tivo for instance but it also means I can have a phone anywhere in the house.

7) Any modern cell phone. I can't imagine life without having a communications device (cell phone) near by. No matter where I am and what I'm doing, there's a certain level of security knowing that you always get ahold of someone if need be.

8) Remote desktop. This is a standard feature on Windows XP Pro and it really is quite wonderful. For example, my wife uses a Pentium 100 notebook with 24 megs of ram. Clearly a wimpy machine running windows 98. However, with a remote desktop client, she can logon to the 1ghz P4 down in the basement from upstairs in the kitchen. Hence, she's able to get onto the net and do things without leaving our two small (and highly destructive!) children alone upstairs. I use it regularly to control my work machine from home or when I'm on the road.

9) Instant Messaging / IRC. We take these things for granted but they are relatively new and they are highly useful things to have. MS is slowly taking over with their MS IM and I must admit, it is quite nice. Makes it possible to talk to and work with people from vastly different geographical locations.

10) InFocus Digital Projector. Hook up your DVD player to this and you can watch movies on the fall, give presentations, etc. It has HDTV input so you can even watch high def TV on it. If you have a big enough area for it, it's a true home theatre.

There are some articles on skinning and themeing coming up that I need to provide users to talk to the media. A few years ago we were able to get a Wired magazine article going and now that XP's out and skinning is starting to really take off, we want to see what we can do.

Of particular interest would be people who are familiar with WinStyles since it abstracts the whole myriad of skinning things into a single interface.

If you're interested either email me or respond here (prferred). Thanks.

Next Monday this site will look and behave differently. The underlying code that powers WinCustomize has been being rewritten over the course of the past couple of months based on what we've learned about running a high powered site.

When WinCustomize.com began, we expected maybe 200,000 visitors per month and the site was designed for that. Over the past several months, WinCustomize has grown and grown to over a MILLION visitors each month, making this one of the most popular sites on the Internet. The re-design takes advantage of advances in technology and technique and hence the site should appear significantly faster once we turn it on.

And while we've tried to make the interface as similar as possible to the existing one, there are features that have been added as well.

A few examples:
A theme manager. WinCustomize is already skininable but version 2 will be very skinnable giving users the ability to greatly alter everything about the site. With the font manager, users can even change the fonts of the site to suit their desires.

The message board will track what messages you've read and haven't read. The stage is set to add in additional features for subscribers (once the subscription system is in).

The new underlying engine is also suited for the upcoming WinCustomize skin browser, a Windows program that hooks directly into the database. From that program, you'll be able to apply skins directly as if this site and all its content were local to your hard drive. Even the message boards and comments are will be akin to reading MS Outlook than a web page.

WinCustomize magazine will be launched and go out to the hundreds of thousands of members (you will be able to control your subscription from the user preferences area).

Polls will be available as well as a featured screenshot. And the featured screenshot will include a link to a WinStyles suite that makes it easy for you to make your own desktop like the screenshot!

The WindowBlinds, WinXP skins and GUI Olympics sections will be merged along with the WebBlinds section into a single "WindowBlinds" section for users looking to submit and use WB visual styles. That will give us more room to display new sections.

Once the subscription system is set up, we'll be adding all sorts of personal organizing and portal features for those users who subscribe to WinCustomize.

And lastly, the new site will have a generally new look without any pop-up ads or in your face advertising.

We're really excited to bring this to you. The team has been working really hard and we hope you like it! Next Monday is the day.

Once upon a time WinCustomize's stated policy was that it would only contain the most popular apps as sections. Sections that weren't popular would be removed.

Over time, common sense grew and we realized that you can't really do that -- have a section and then remove it. What about the hard work of skin authors and such who took the time to submit something?

So we took a different route - we only would DISPLAY the most popular sections and the others would be dsiplayed by clicking on the header bar ("library") so that you can get to the other sections.

So, if you were in our shoes and had to pick say 15 sections to have on a skin site - ANY 15 sections (whether we have them here or not) what would they be with the criteria based on POPULARITY (i.e. no breaks for a "unique" freeware app please).

Where popularity is determined by a combination (pick your own way of weighting the factors in this combo):

1) Users using the program
2) Activity of skin authors
3) Legitimacy (i.e. app needs to be actively developed and developer of app must publicly approve skins being made with its format).
4) Uniqueness (should matter some, i.e. how many skinnable MP3 players should a site have?)

Here's what I'd pick to get things started:

1) Wallpapers
2) Windows Media Player
3) WinAmp
4) WindowBlinds
5) ICQ Plus
6) NeXTStart
7) Coolplayer*
8) Dashboard*
9) DesktopX
10) WinStyles
11) IconPackager
12) ObjectBar
13) Litestep
14) LogonStudio
15) CursorXP

Others that are right up there:

a) Trillian
Talisman
c) Hoverdesk
d) Screenshots

* WinCustomize is the official skin site for Dashboard and Skinplayer so they will always be part of any top 15 list.

Stardock apps that aren't listed:
1) PocketBlinds. Just isn't getting enough skinning support, has been a release candidate for a long time.
2) WebBlinds.
3) SkinStudio widgets

Other possibilities:
Beatnik (we have a section for this but lack of activity took it from the default home page choices)
SkinMem
Quick Notes
Yahoo Messenger

BTW, you can select which sections to display from your settings. So you can have as many or few that you want.

Interesting discussion on what people think of the new Star Wars toys.

In the shameless plug department, GalCiv Alpha 5 (which I'm the project manager and lead AI developer on) went up today. It's not publicly available, but you can track its development over at GalCiv.com

Oh I'm so excited! May is going to be great! Spiderman AND Star Wars this month. Which has the advantage? There's an interesting story on that.