First screenshots of WindowBlinds 3 released:

https://www.stardock.com/products/windowblinds/wb3/wb3-1.jpg

https://www.stardock.com/products/windowblinds/wb3/wb3-2.jpg

https://www.stardock.com/products/windowblinds/wb3/wb3-3.jpg

After months of development, Stardock is preparing to announce WindowBlinds version 3. WindowBlinds is a program that turns Windows into having a skinnable user interface. Version 3 is going to be based off of the beta of WindowBlinds XP.

The new version will be much smaller in size and require far less memory. On Windows XP, it integrates directly into Microsoft's visual style framework. On Windows 98/ME/2000, WindowBlinds will talk to a Stardock developed XP-like skinning engine. The goal is for it to be seamlessly part of the OS.

The other major feature of WindowBlinds 3 comes in the form of Smart Bars which allow users to add items themselves right into the title bar or borders of a window (such a MP3 player or stock ticker, or quick launch or whatever) rather than using a skin where the skin author happened to do that.

Stardock will be releasing WindowBlinds 3 in October. The betas will begin appearing on their Object Desktop network in about 2 weeks.

A white paper outlining the details of WindowBlinds 3 is available at:
https://www.stardock.com/products/windowblinds/whitepaper_wb3.html

I highly recommend checking out Crae's insightful article at Tek. It looks back on the world of skinning in the past year:

http://www.teknidermy.net/article.php3?title=25&issue=6&volume=1

I really enjoyed the article. Though I disagree with the view that things look bleak.

But I can see where he's coming from. The skin community is rapidly approaching a cross roads. Actually, an on-ramp may be a better analogy. The release of Windows XP is likely to completely put skinning into the mainstream. This is an anathema to those who like to see it as a cottage industry. Indeed, those who see small developers like Stardock as a threat to the cottage industry are really going to be up in arms as the millions of newbie skinners jump in once XP opens their eyes.

How do we measure the success of a skinning community? Most old timers have an exagerated memory of skinz.org. That was a site I loved. But being friends with Mian and Toasty, I also knew their traffic. In terms of community activity, DeviantArt dwarfs skinz.org (in terms of postings). In terms of actual skins being downloaded per day, WinCustomize does vastly more downloads per day than skinz.org did at its height and rougly and equal amount of message board traffic (in posts per day). And these sites are able to do that without completely dominating the community as skinz.org did.

Of course, back then it was a much smaller community. Skinz.org was the first professionally run no nonsense skin site. For those of you who don't know Mian and Toasty, they are both truly gifted. They..get it. They have an uncanny business sense of knowing what they need to do. They don't innovate, but they see a concept and they make it better and one of the results of their professionalism was skinz.org.

And while it did dominate, it wasn't as popular as DeviantArt or WinCustomize are today. Skinz.org had a total of 100,000+ registered users when it went down after nearly 2 years of being up. WinCustomize got 40,000 new registered accounts last month alone.

A news item on DeviantArt can get hundreds of users participating in it. Something that never would have or could have happened on skinz.org.

So in terms of the quantity of users, the skin community is growing. Perhaps what Crae sees as bleak is the loosening of the community -- it's not tight knit anymore. It's more splintered...more diluted. That I would agree with.

If you want to join us on IRC, load up your favorite IRC program and go to irc.stardock.com. There is a #stardock channel and a #wincustomize channel. Hope to see you there!

This month we saw our traffic sky rocket as Stardock merged their skin library with ours as a way to cut costs and make things easier for users.

This has had quite an impact on the application sections here. For instance, Th etop 3 Litestep themes got over 100 downloads yesterday. This ironically makes the place where the most Litestep themes are currently being downloaded. Other apps listed here have received a similar boost.

Overall, the site was visited by over 580,000 *unique* people this month. This put WinCustomize into the top 100 websites that Hitbox currently carries and into the top 5 in its category. Our category includes Simtel -- one of the biggest file download sites in the world and we're catching up on them.

Referals are still very important. But this month, 70% of users came here from book marks or manually typed in the WC URL.

Out of the referals, Stardock made up 64% of them. Amongst the reamining:

Deviant Art: 1.6%
LS2K: .66%
LotsOfSkins: .46%
Customize.org: 41%

Customize.org must have really returned with a bang to have that good of a stat for the month. I suspect when the auto-community link generator kicks in on the 1st that Customize.org will be one of the 5 links randomly chosen (By referrals) for Sept.

All this growth, as you can imagine, comes at a cost. That cost primarily being bandwidth. If you find this site useful, we ask that you support the site by purchasing a shirt or CD or something. It goes to pay for the bandwidth that is used to deliver skins to you.

https://www.wincustomize.com/store.asp

In August we added T-shirts and other goodies to the store which helped get the site to 30% of its goal towards paying for its part of the bandwidth (we have until December to get to 100% each month or we'll lose some of our bandwidth). 30% is up from the 26% in July so we're getting better. We'll keep you up to date on how things progress. The shirts are really inexpensive and really high quality (wearing one now as I type this).

And finally, we should all thank our tireless moderators without whom this site would come to a screaching hault:

The Web goddess of WinCustomize: Alexandrie. She's been working behind the scenes making the site better and faster all month.

The code lord:
T-man. He's been putting in all sorts of overtime to put in features to make the site easier and more useful.

The Moderators:
Jafo, DavidK, Treetog, Migeleto, and others have been working very hard to keep those skin submissions being made available in a timely fashion.

Things are rolling along well. In September we hope to add polls to the website and possibly a way to integrate your Stardock.net account (if you have Object Desktop or Drengin.net) into your WinCustomize account so you can manage all your "stuff" from a single interface. Plus the WinCustomize skin browser may show up in beta next month.

Thanks for visiting our site!

..that you were in an on-line community.

I started with this whole "virtual community" stuff back in 1987 when I ran a Commodore 64 BBS. We had about 200 to 300 members on the BBS. You used your phone modem to call the number of the BBS and connected to it. It was run on C-net 12.0 and later Image 1.0

That was how I met Pat (T-man). He ran a BBS called King Arthur's Court. I ran the BBS "Stardock".

All these BBSes had multiple access groups (0 through 9) and when we posted, our access rank was put in front of our name. So when I posted on Pat's BBS, I would be Lord Macros (that was my handle). On my BBS it would be Admiral Macros.

We tried to focus our BBSes to mainly be about the message boards. In order to download, you had to have X number of points and the only way to get those points was to post and respond in the message boards. This system worked pretty well. It was a really fun way to meet people in the local area who had like interests.

Not much has changed, as the "community" got bigger, the usual sorts of squables one sees here and on other websites would pop up. But most posts had to do about talking about "stuff" like the meaning of life, finding out what girls wanted in guys and vice versa. There were only a handful of girls versus a ton of guys.

Now, 14 years later (good gawd it's been that long?) not too much has really changed in terms of on-line communities. Sure, the people are from all over the world and they can all be on at once (as I type this, there are 295 other people currently on this website) but the message boards are almost all the same as they were then. Right down to the "what song are you listening to right now?" stuff.

So what place did you first learn about on-line communities?

As I surf to my various favorite websites, I've noticed two things:

Either:

A) They (the websites) are trying various new ways to make money (paypal, selling mugs, hats, etc.).

or

They're run by old "new economy" companies that are slowly going under (or fast in VA Linux's case).

Banner ads now bring in about $.15 per CPM for most sites. And it costs about a megabit of bandwidth to get a million page views. A megabit costs around $500 to $1000. So you can make $150 in banner revenue for ever $500 to $1000 you spend on bandwidth. So clearly that's not a good scenario.

So what's going to happen?

Some say that the net will go back to the hobbiests. But that really isn't possible. The problem is BANDWIDTH and then the admin costs. Joe hobbiest's website won't be able to handle 1 million page views because of the bandwidth costs.

Others say that bandwidth costs will go down. But the problem with that is that many of these companies that created all this piping did so thinking that new economy was going to keep going. Even at $500 to $1000 per megabit, they're losing massive amount. Anyone see the report on how much money Northern Telecom lost last quarter? Or that AT&T is considering letting @Home file for bankruptcy? It's a catch-22 for them.

So what's going to happen? Any predictions?

AltDesk is a virtual desktops' manager for Windows with skins' support.
AltDesk lets you to add more functionality to your computer's desktop.
It can create many virtual desktops which can be placed as you want.
It has neat skinnable interface. So you can build your skins.
Features included:
- Neat skinnable user interface.
- Fully customizable hotkeys (Win key included).
- "Boss" key.
- Program can be easily moved from one desktop to another.
- All its elements are fully customizable.
- Sticky Windows, i.e. windows that exist on all the desktops.
- Little system requirements.
- Transparency in Win2k.
- Startup for each deskto

Home Page: http://www.astonshell.com/
Download URL: http://www.astonshell.com/files/altdesk.zip

What's new in version 1.3?
+ Added startup for each desktop.
* New default skin.
+ New option: move (or don't move) the icon of foreground application to
the left-top corner of cell.
+ New option: circular list of desktops (allows to switch between desktops
using single hotkey).
+ New option: Internet Explorer 5.x compatibility mode.
+ New commands: Mimimize, restore, maximize the window, update the icon(s).
* Fixed bug with Internet Explorer 5.x in WinNT, Win2000.
* Fixed bugs with drawing the cells.
* Fixed bug with fullscreen applications.

The WinCustomize hats are now available! If you're enjoying this site, please help support its existence throught the purchase of a hat, shirt, etc. Check out how cool the hats are!

One of the things we're working on is an actual website browsing program which we're calling WinCustomize.

The program will do more than just browse this site though, it will let you directly apply a skin. So if you're on and you like the wallpaper or WindowBlinds skin or DesktopX object or WinAmp skin or whatever, you can just click on Apply and it'll download and apply that skin automatically.

We're writing it as a way to try to help support the site. It'll let you do everything that you can from the browser and eventually allow you to do even more (such as access additional statistics and other things that would require a lot of bandwidth to do via a web page but not much bandwidth when done by a program).

The program will be $14.95 when it's completed.

Here's a link to a screenshot:

http://pooh.stardock.com/wincustomize.jpg

We expect it to become available next month on the store.

SkinMem is a freeform skinnable system resource monitor. The program displays the percentage of the current RAM being used by your PC as well as the available RAM left in Mbs. One difference between this system monitor and other similar programs is the realtime updating of the information.

The skins can be any size or shape and the placement of the text details is totally up to the skinner as well. The skin can have a transparent colour and requires only one bmp image with the ini file. So skinning the program is easy.