The first 3 events are:

Most Cheerful skin (February 18)
Most depressing skin (February 20)
Fastest skin (February 22)

Note that all entries must never have been publicly submitted prior to January 15, 2002.

When you submit a skin, it is eligible for all the different events so you don't have to pick an event to be included on. A user who uploaded one skin could theoretically win all 15 events.

These first 3 events are kind of warm up events. What makes a skin cheerful? What makes on depressing? These are a matter of taste and require a user to know enough on user interface design combined with human perceptions to be able to create that.

Fastest skin, on the other hand, is measurable. The best known skin benchmarking program is SkinBench (though we will be using an internal benchmarking program for our tests). The judges will have quite a bit of latitude though on this though. The benchmark we use only goes down to the nearest 100 milisecond. This is important for you to know as a skin author because if two skins finish the benchmarks in say 7.3 seconds, which one will they pick? That will be up to them.

The first 3 warm up events will provide >$250 in cash and potentially another $500 or so in prizes.

You can update your skin as many times as you like. But the version evaluated will be the one that is available to us at the time we begin evaluating the skins.

If you have any questions or want any clarifications, please comment below and we'll try our best to help.

Have fun!

If you want to make skins for the contest you'll need WindowBlinds and SkinStudio.

You can get the Olympic version from one of the founding sites or from here:

http://www.guiolympics.com/download.asp

We made a few minor changes to the rules that you should be aware of:

1) Skins submitted to the contest MUST be new skins. By definition that means they may not have been submitted anywhere before January 15th.

2) We have clarified what GUI Olympics may do with submitted skins (by submitting a skin, you give us the okay to distribute it - seems obvious but it needs to be said - previous wording was too vague).

3) You are free to submit your skins to any site you wish but some of the skin site admins have requested that you wait until after the contest is over. It's up to you though.

According to the data from Hitbox, Stardock's home page accounts for 85% of the growth. We believe this is due to Windows XP providing a much more solid basis for doing desktop enhancements (skinning and theming) which is bringing record levels of new users into our community.

Hence, a user learning about Windows XP often hears about WindowBlinds or ObjectBar or CursorXP. Then downloads it, then comes to WinCustomize to get more stuff. There they learn about other skin sites and other apps to try out like Litestep and Coolplayer and so on.

And in fact, because WindowBlinds, WinStyles, and CursorXP have their own domains, we can see their impact on their own:

WindowBlinds represented 43%
CursorXP represented 3.9%
WinStyles represented 2%

Those 3 apps thus represent about 50% of the 85% of the new traffic from Stardock.

The other sites in our community helped make up around 4% of the new traffic (which when you're talking about millions of visitors and nearly a million unique people is a lot of people).

We'd like to thank the following sites for their continued support:

deviantART
http://www.deviantart.com

Deskmod
http://www.deskmod.com

LotsOfSkins
http://www.lotsofskins.com

Skinbase
http://www.skinbase.org

VelocityART
http://www.velocityart.com

Customize.org
http://www.customize.org

A few other sites of note that sent a lot of traffic:

DailyRotation sent nearly a thousand new people here this month.
http://www.dailyrotation.com

Big thanks to OSNews which isn't just a great site but their Admin found a *critical* WindowBlinds 3.1 bug that affected Windows 98SE users that we addressed (which is why it's 3.1A). You should absolutely check out her wonderful site:
http://www.osnews.com

And Pixtudio has become quite a popular site and made a good business out of developing quality skins and websites.
http://www.pixtudio.com

Bandwidth costs remain a real problem. At some point we'll be adding banners to the site to help pay the bills. This website requires more constant bandwidth than the bandwidth most companies have on their internal network.

In February much of our work will be on the GUI Olympics (http://www.guiolympics.com). In March, we'll begin looking at adding new features to the site, particular to the message boards, polls, and other goodies as well as adding some new sections.

Have fun!

So anyway, there I am..

I'm at the office with my mega system. My dual P4-1.7Ghz machine, 21 inch monitor, IBM DeskStart Ultra ATA 100 hard drive, Geforce 3.

But something hasn't felt right. It feels too slow. My home machine always feels faster for some reason.

I check...

And I check...

CPU benchmark - excellent, it's fast!

Video benchmar - OH yea baby!

Hard drive benchmark...

Going...

Going...

Hmmm. This can't be right...

3.5 MB/s?

Wait, that's slower than a 40 speed CD ROM drive.

What do other computers get...

20 MB/s?!

What?

How can this be?

What does my pathetic laptop at home get? 8 MB/s?! What about my $800 Dell machine at home... 18 MB/s?

Crap! Why? WHY?!

I hate computers.

Typewriters my friends. Typewriters are coming back. Mark my words. They will come back and this fad we call computers will blow away like yesterday's newspaper.

GRRRR! Stupid computer!

The preliminaries are nearly complete and the event will officially open in 3 days.

If you would like to try your hand in creating WindowBlinds skins - it's very easy to create one with SkinStudio, then go here:

http://www.guiolympics.com/download.asp

Represent your favorite websites, have some fun and possibly win some cash and prizes. Remember - most contests don't get that many entries and with $10,000 in cash and prizes being given out, there's a good chance by entering you can win something.

The contest will officially begin on February 1. That is when submissions will begin to be made public for users to see, use, get a feel for.

If you would like to create a skin and have a chance to win some of the $10,000 in cash and prizes download, here's where you can get WindowBlinds and SkinStudio GUI Olympic Editions:

http://www.guiolympics.com/download.asp

Don't think you don't have a chance. With 75 different chances to win a prize, the odds are high. Contests normally don't get that many entries (30 to 40 total) so your chances are quite good.

If the website you want to support isn't already listed go here:

http://www.guiolympics.com/directory.asp and add it.

Create a skin, have fun, support your favorite website, and win some cash and prizes!

Sigh. One of my 2 tadpoles I got for Christmas died this morning.

Definitely difficult to raise. The ones I catch in the pond in the summer seem much easier to raise. These tadpoles are leopard frog tadpoles.

World famous user interface designer, Dr. Theo Mandel, has agreed to participate in the GUI Olympics as one of the judges of the contest.

Dr. Mandel will be replacing me as a judge. As the primary article writer and commentator on the GUI Olympics, it was becoming apparent that it would not be appropriate for me to be a commentator/article creator and still be one of the judges.

The change couldn't have come at a better time. Dr. Mandel, founder of IDD (http://www.interface-design.net) is a well known author of user interface design books such as "Elements of User Interface Design".

He was also involved on both CUA 89 and CUA 91 (the user interface standards that govern how Windows, OS/2, and Linux today largely work).

I just bought Medal of Honor - it's 1.2 GIGS on the hard drive! Insane. Just ship it on DVD and let me play it that way!

Many users swear by Notepad in their creation of WindowBlinds skins. That's usually becaue when they got started, notepad was the best way to do it. Early versions of BuildBlinds and SkinStudio just weren't easy enough to get the job done.

But that's changing. A use can now create a skin in a matter of hours rather than days by using some of the features of SkinStudio to their advantage.

Here are a few links to help get started:
If you don't have SkinStudio you can get it at http://www.skinstudio.net

Here is a link to the UIS 2 skin tutorial: http://www.windowblinds.net/skinning/2-uis2tutorial.html

One of the best tutorials I've seen and best third party one for sure is here:
http://www.aleksyandr.com/tutorial.htm

Aleksyandr did a great job on this.

Now for me, I'm lazy. Dangerously lazy. And for that reason, what I do is literally draw up my GUI in say Photoshop how I want it to look. Then I load up SkinStudio and choose new blank skin. It then creates a completed Luna style skin. From there, I then go to file->load template image and load up my template bitmap.

From there, I can literally select the pieces I want and press the cut button and it will do the work for you. No need to mess with different button states and such because it does it for you.

There will be a more complete article on this feature soon. But for now, that feature will save you a lot of time. The real work should be in creating the graphics, not having to mess with the skin language itself.

If you have any specific questions on skinning, respond here and I'll ask someone from Stardock (or I'll do it myself) to respond with some info on it. Good luck and have fun!