The number of unique visitors, that is, the number of different individuals that came to WinCustomize reached around 750,000 in November. Total number of visitors was well into the millions. WinCustomize doesn't use page views or visitors as its index of growth because we're interested in how many unique individuals are getting into customizing their machines.

The continued growth is good news for all those that like to customize their computers, create skins, create software that customizes, or just likes to hang out (though I wish our message boards got more use).

We expect traffic to significantly decrease next month. Why? Because there are now 3 new skin sites that should (we hope) begin to distribute the user base amongst more sites. For the past half year, essentially WinCustomize and DeviantART have split the traffic with the remainder going to SkinBase and elsewhere.

SkinBase, by our calculations, has seen a roughly DOUBLING of its traffic this month. It is clearly a website on the rise and one that anyone reading should definitely check out (www.skinbase.org).

But in November, 2 sites returned, desktoys.net and LotsOfSkins. In a few days, Deskmod should return. In all, there will be six major skin sites and several smaller ones.

So where has our traffic been coming from?

#1 Stardock is where 70% of our referrals come from. The parent company of this site is Stardock. So Stardock's health directly affects WinCustomize's health since as it gets more traffic, so does WinCustomize via referrals.

#2 TweakXP.com. (around 1%)That's right. Above any skin site, TweakXP sent more referrals to WinCustomize than any other customize related site.

#3 Customize.org. (around 1%). Customize.org has been up under different owners but was essentially the first skin site. It's hard to gauge how popular the site is but it must be quite popular to send so many thousands of users our way. We thank them for their support and comradeship.

#4 DeviantART (around .4%) returned to the top 5 this month. It, like WInCustomize, has experienced growing popularity. I'd trade some of our high download counts for their message board/news activity.

#5 Betanews.com (arond .4%) always hovers up there. Nate of Betanews has really been very instrumental in helping the community over the years (and not always appreciated for it).

Other sites of note:
DailyRotation: (.3%). This is THE news site for the customization community. They are a true news portal. Check them out www.dailyrotation.com.

Pixtudio: (.1%). The best of the best of skins can be found here. If WinCustomize is the Walmart of skin sites, then Pixtudio is the..um.. well that fancy store with the very best in quality stuff in it. You know, the store that smells good! The very best skins on the Internet can be found there. Okay, I'll be quiet now.

So where are we now?

We are going to open up 2 new sections next month (December) now that we have a bit of extended bandwidth. I won't give away what they are but one is for a freeware program, the other is a shareware program. Both are XP related.

We would like to look at adding some new non-XP sections. If you have a suggestion, put it below.

To qualify it must:
a) Have skins that are small (i.e. we want to avoid something that has 500K sized "themes"). Bandwidth is still very limited and I can tell you that DesktopX/Wallpaper/NeXTStart alone use 2/3rds of the bandwidth of this site. So if the program you want to support has skins of typically 500K or higher, no way. Sorry. Ideally it would be something that's typically 100K or less.

It has to be reasonably popular.

c) Has to work on Windows 98, ME, 2000, and XP. According to the sales stats, XP doesn't have more than 5% of the market (legally). Most people have Windows 98/ME/2000 and this site is WINCustomize not XPCustomize. We already feel pretty crappy about putting up 2 XP centric sections, we want to avoid adding more.


Anyway, things seem to be going pretty well.

WinCustomize got its bandwidth upped today by Stardock. WinCustomize now has more bandwidth than many company's internal networks have! Hope you notice the difference!

Stardock has put the first Windows XP-aware version of SkinStudio up on Object Desktop. This beta version makes it much easier for users to create, edit and import XP Start bars. SkinStudio is designed to make it relatively easy for anyone to create skins from scratch or to modify their existing skins for personal use. Skin authors have found SkinStudio's import feature to be powerful because they can easily use features from their other skins (such as buttons and scrollbars).

After a dynamic development period, HoverDesk rel. 2.40 is now publically available. HoverDesk 2.40 contains many new features and additions to existing features. Several are unique visual effects not found in other software. Others are new system access tools and organization tools. New features in 2.40 are:

- Autodetection of screen resolution (optional user setting).

- Drop Shadow and Outline text effects for tiles, menu entries and task tiles.

- Skinable / Stretchable Systray with optional drop shadows for icons.

- New HoverDesk theme manager with integtrated export and snapshot generator, wallpaper manager and more.

-Expandable applications list. (User option for adding specific applications to configuration dialog drop-down choices)

- New pop-up menu entries available for Common Program Menu / Common Startup Menu (NT) / My Images / Quicklaunch folders.

- Taskbar features: Auto Reorganization (no more gaps), New Hover texture.

- Recipient Tiles: Folder or .exe targets for drag-n-drop file management or launching.

- Theme De-bug feature for checking and fixing tile associations.

- Built-in Memory Defrag (CPU module

- Windows XP compatable.

and more ...

Be sure to read "ReadMe" files during installation for important information!!

HoverDesk website : http://www.hoverdesk.net
History file : http://www.hoverdesk.net/history.doc

To a newcomer, probably nothing is as melodramatic as the regular discussion of "community". To a newcomer, it's all a matter of taking what is ultimately a hobby way too seriously.

But on the other hand, I would also argue that of all the zillions of virtual communities out there, the customization (or "Skin") community has had a lot of impact which I would credit to its blend of grass roots and commercial strengths combining (grass roots strength with commercial marketing to bring that grass roots movement to the attention of the mainstream).

l0c elsewhere made a post wondering whether we were at a fork in the road. Where on the one hand you would have the people who see skinning at "Art" and the "hackers" who like to create and edit things with resource hackers on the other side of the fork. That two distinct communities would emerge.

I don't agree with that distinction. I think there is only 1 community broken up into niches. There are the people who see computers as more than just a means to an end. And many of those people want to have the ability to customize their computers to suit their unique and specific needs. That's the foundation of skinning.

Stardock's goal has been to allow as many people as possible into that world as possible. To provide so many different options to those people that it could make a business model out of it - Object Desktop. The more people who are part of our community, the better.

However, there are two sides of the coin. There, I think, those that would like to see things as a more intimate community where the casual users are kept out and it's just a core group of expert users who set the tone and direction of customization.

What are your thoughts? Do you see customization as being eventually mainstream where most people are using a combination of what's built in and third party solutions to control their OS or are we at a high point now and that it'll soon return to being where people are happy with whatever's built into the OS and everything else is marginalized to the hackers and super tweakers?

It's amazing that there are still people ignorant of copyright law.

1) There is plenty of case law demonstrating that websites ARE legally responsible if they do not remove copyright violations from servers they host upon notification.

2) A copyright violation is generally considered to be when a whole or significant part of a copyrighted work is used without license.

3) While it is true that you cannot protect inspirations under copyright, they are protected under other intellectual property laws if they are similar enough to create "reasonable confusion" (hence why Apple could legally eliminate Aqua-like skins if they so chose). Case law has put this under the term "Trade Dress".

Here's a link: http://www.tomwbell.com/writings/FullVTD.html#H2


Simply put, if you want to be a stickler, yes, you can stop people from creating "inspired" works of visual intellectual property.


4) Yes, even things that are "Free" are protected by intellectual property. If a website is found guilty of knowingly hosting copyrighted material, I believe under US law a plaintiff may sue for up to $125,000 (I'll have to dig more on that as it's been awhile). This law was primarily put into place so that small software developers (Back in the 80s) had some teeth when going after "pirate BBSes". Replace BBSes with websites and you have the same deal.

And finally:

Isn't it nearly always the case that those who don't create commodity level intellectual property that are the ones who seem to be really free with other people's?

So why hasn't Stardock gone after rippers directly?

Publicity. The best thing that could happen to one of these unethical sites would be to gain international media coverage and the quickest route to that would be for Stardock (or Microsoft or Apple or you name it) to go after them. So we'd only do such a thing as a last resort.

Tomorrow we should be increasing our bandwidth by 50% and adding an additional server. So hopefully by tomorrow evening the site will feel a lot faster.

Stardock releases WindowBlinds 3.0!

After months of effort Stardock has released its third generation of its popular GUI customization program, WindowBlinds. Version 3 of WindowBlinds adds a host of new features and on Windows XP makes WindowBlinds skins behave as native visual styles. It brings this technology to existing versions of Windows as well. Any Windows user running WindowBlinds 3 will be able to completely transform the Windows GUI to look however they want it to.

Stardock has focused on improving WindowBlinds’ performance to the point that it is, on Windows XP, faster than the bundled visual styles (Luna) when running a similar skin. It does this while using fewer resources and less memory as well. Stardock was able to do this by taking advantage of new hardware acceleration features in video cards (visit http://www.xpbench.com to see if your video card supports XP APIs). WindowBlinds 3 boasts a completely new architecture designed to minimize resource usage while providing new features such as SmartBars, Inclusion lists, Hyperpaint, per skin font/color customization, animated mouse-overs, and more.

For users of Windows 98, ME, 2000 WindowBlinds brings much of the new XP theming architecture over. In the coming months, users with WindowBlinds 3 on those versions of Windows will be able to take advantage of “XP theme aware applications”.

WindowBlinds allows users to customize nearly every part of the Windows GUI. Title bars, scrollbars, start bar, radio buttons, push buttons, etc. It can also add additional buttons to the title bar to enhance productivity such as roll-up buttons, URL buttons, always-on-top buttons, and more. It supports a fairly powerful but simple plugin format so that users can put nearly anything they want onto the Windows title bar.

The complete WindowBlinds 3 guide is at:
https://www.stardock.com/products/windowblinds/wb3/wb3_guide_final.htm

Users can download it at: http://www.windowblinds.net.


Screenshots:
https://www.stardock.com/products/windowblinds/wb-nov01.jpg
https://www.stardock.com/temp/wb3galore.gif
https://www.wincustomize.com/images/news/1182001101801PM1.jpg

If you're on this site, then you probably enjoy doing cool things with your PC. Your PC is not just a means to an end. Let me introduce you to a really cool site I occasionally visit - LightSteam Designs. Check out how well the site is designed and how original and organic it is. Check it out for yourself.

http://www.steve.nave.com/Pingis/Pingis.html

Requires flash but was pretty fun!