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.

Interesting article at The Register claims that Microsoft does not allow people to remove Windows from their machines.

Another Star Wars movie arrives and for the second time in a row the toy
makers are putting out utter garbage. There's nothing worse than seeing toy
makers completely patronize kids with gimmicky stuff that few kids would
want to play with and things that just look lame.

As I peered at the various toys, vehicles, guns, and action figures, I was
just astonished with how out of touch these guys must be. And you know that
they'll blame the movie or Lucasfilm for their eventual failure to sell.

Here's why:

1) There's no goal.
What do I mean? As a kid (started collecting at age 5 when Star Wars came
out) the back of each action figure listed EVERY figure available at the
time. This gave me a goal to try to obtain every single one I could. I
remember after one birthday going hunting with my mom to store after store
trying to find Jawas. But instead, the back of the boxes just show all the
various moveable parts and give no idea how many figures are out there. This
leads to #2.

2) Removable parts = bad thing. Yea, I somehow managed not to lose all those
storm trooper guns when I was a kid but I never used them. Just too much of
a pain and I was always too worried that I'd lose them. To an 8 year old
boy, losing a part is the end of the world and these new action figures
practically beg you to lose half their parts. What the hell were they
thinking?

3) The figures aren't fun to play with together. The action figures are
basically dolls now. The original ones were stiff but easy to stand up
enmasse so that kids could re-enact battles or use their imaginations to
come up with new adventures. But the new ones are so cumbersome that they
are designed that you will play with them one at a time or possibly two at a
time since it's so hard to stand them up or do anything with them. So
surprise surprise, kids aren't going to want to buy a bunch of them. I had
20+ storm troopers for instance. You think any kid is going to want 20
"super battle droids"? That leads to #4

4) The generic figures are either missing or pathetic. Remember the battle
droid figures from Ep 1? Holy cow was that pathetic. Various parts to lose
and they felt so cheap. Compare that battle droid do the speeder bike
trooper from Return of the Jedi. Light years difference. I couldn't even
find a new "Storm trooper" which is really ironic because those are the ones
that might possibly be purchased in quantity by kids. Good action figures
have substance (physically to them). They should be designed for kids to
play with outside and be tough. These seemed to be designed for 30+
nerdlings living in a basement who won't even take them out of their
packaging.

5) The vehicles are pathetic. Why do toy makers think that kids want things
that look cutesy? Kids want things that LOOK as realistic as possible. So
why come out with a slave 1 or jedi fighter or whatever wher ethe colors
have been brightened? I have the original slave 1 still from when I was a
kid, it would kick the new slave 1's ass.

6) The guns. Holy cow, some of them are practically all orange. They look
cheap and have strange colors that aren't realistic at all. Compare them to
say Han Solo's blaster toy which was not a particularly good toy even at the
time but at least didn't patronize the kids.

7) Toys are too specific. I can't just get character A. I have to get
Character A in a particular scenario. "Anakan Skywalker in shower cap!" I
mean come on, how many Anakin's or whatever do they think some kid is going
to want? It was bad enough in the old days having Luke Skywalker in Hoth
outfit and Luke Skywalker in Bespin garb but this is taken to the Nth
degree. It's all back to the first issue - kids want obtainable goals. No
kid is going to whine their way to collect 5 versions of Obi-wan. Just
aren't enough holidays during the year.

I remember when they did this sort of thing with Transformers toys years
ago. I'm sure they just thought that demand for Transformers toys dropped
off. No, it's that kids couldn' t keep up with a constantly increasing
deluge of characters. In their own greed quest, they end up undermining
their sales.

Of course, by Christmas season look for the inevitable "Has Star Wars lost
its merchanidizing ability?" It won't even occur to them that maybe if the
toys that they made weren't utter garbage that kids might want them. My son
is 5 and the first thing he said when he saw the Jango fett figure was "Too
many parts, I'll lose them!"

Pity. And right when Steve is leaving blue's clues too.