Results so far:

#1 Grayhaze $800
#2 Hippy $637.50
#3 Alexandrie $375
#4 Treetog $337.50

Note: 50% of the above cash is split with the website they represent:

The websites thus get this much:

#1 LotsOfSkins $556.25
#2 deviantART $431.25
#3 velocityART $425.00

Congratulations to all for supporting your favorite websites and doing pretty well on your own.

The $500 cash to the top 3 skin authors isn't shared btw. The top 3 websites get their own $500 in cash.

Anyone who picked up an honorable mention will get a free copy of Object Desktop (or a renewal), an Object Desktop sweat shirt, a T-shirt, a LWNinja T-shirt and some other goodies.

Those who won multiple honorable mentions will be given additional Object Desktop renewals.

Alexandrie's skin "LOS" took the gold for most creative skin of the GUI Olympics. For full details of who won, visit www.guiolympics.com (or follow the link below).

And the winner is...

WindowBlinds 3.3 will be available soon to the general public (it's already available for registered users and on Object Desktop). WindowBlinds 3.3 is faster, more feature rich and uses less memory than previous versions.

Talisman is a replacement shell for Windows that is extremely customizeable. A new beta version is available to check out.

Tomorrow the results for the final two events (Most Creative Skin and Best Overall Skin) will be announced! Stay tuned!

The first GUI Olympics was a huge success. Far far more successful than we had ever imagined.

While we expected somewhere between 30 and 50 skins to be submitted, we ended up with nearly 140 skins.

Moreover, the quality of the skins was amazingly high.

We also learned a lot of lessons. No one had ever done anything quite like this before and we definitely have ideas on how to make the Summer GUI Olympics better.

Here are some conclusions we had:

1) Judges. Next time we will bring in 5 expert judges to judge the skins. Expertise on skinning the apps used will be the qualification.

2) Shorter time. Rather than have the event span over 2 months, we'll instead announce that it is coming and then have the actual event last only 3 weeks total with events bundled in groups rather than every X days.

3) More applications. For the first one, we picked WindowBlinds visual styles. The reason was simple, we could find a sponser easily (us) and it is the most popular purely customization program. For the next one we'll have icons, a skinnable MP3 player, and something else. We haven't decided yet.

4) More submission controls. Once a skin is uploaded, it's up there, we'll allow ONE update.

5) Real medals. We'd like to have an "overall" medal winner for each general category. So for instance, the overall winner in the WindowBlinds visual styles events seems to be Grayhaze followed by Hippy and then Treetog (on points). So they would literally receive a gold, silver, and bronze medal at the end. We don't have anything quite like that prepared here but then again, the summer GUI Olympics probably won't have nearly as much cash involved. .

It's been great fun seeing not just all the skin authors creating some of the best, most creative, and just plain cool skins ever made, but seeing all of the various customization sites working together.

And the participation has been incredible. LotsOfSkins, DeviantART, SkinBase, TweakXP, Customize.org, VeleocityCART, Lockergnome, Betanews, Deskmod, and Neowin all put together teams of skin authors who have competed.

Not every site won a medal -- I don't think anyone would have imagined scenarios where a single skin site (such as LotOfSkins) would have more submissions than we had projected would be made in total for the contest -- but every site came out looking pretty good.

Thank you to all who have participated and congratulations to all the winners thus far. You all should pat yourselves on the back. You did great!

On Tuesday we are going to announce 5 additional awards (not medals, but something different - use the ending of the GUI Olympics to honor some skin authors).

Have Windows 98, ME, NT, or 2000 but want to have the new Windows XP Start bar both in look and in functionality?

Download XPBar, a program that will do just that. XPBar is a stripped down version of ObjectBar that focuses on handling the XP Start bar for non-XP users. Grab it now.

For the Summer GUI Olympics, we will be increasing the number of types of events significantly. For this first one, we focused purely on the creation of WindowBlinds visual styles.

For the summer one, we will have multiple GUI disciplines represented.

One of them will be icons. The best COMPLETE set of icons. Submissions will be in icon packages (used by IconPackager which is a free download).

We will bring you more news on other events of the Summer GUI Olympics as they are finalized. If you have any specific wishes, let us know here.

Requirements are:
1) Program that uses it must be very popular.
2) Program must run on Windows 98, ME, 2000, and XP.
3) Program must be developed by someone willing to sponser the prizes.

Since we're not going to have more than 5 different areas (programs) and one of them is icons, bear that in mind on any suggestions.

Ten years ago, IBM launched OS/2 2.0 and it changed the world. When you look at your coomputer right now, whether it be Windows, Linux, Mac or something else, know this: it would be a lot different had OS/2 never existed. Its influence on personal computing is hard to gauge. To celebrate its tenth birthday, I've written a tribute to it and explain some of the things it introduced.

(reposted due to comments being broken)