I don't know about you but I hate having to wait until the end of the year to read those "best of" lists.
This is doubly true because those lists almost always favor things released near the end of the year. Well, we're half-way through 2007 already and so here's our list of the top 5 coolest things we've seen
so far this year!  #1 Erector Spykee Robot. A brilliant idea made real. This is a remote control robot that has a microphone and camera on it that will transmits what it sees and ...

IntroductionSkinStudio is a program that allows users to create visual styles for Windows XP and Windows Vista. These visual styles are applied by the popular GUI skinning program, WindowBlinds.  A fully complete visual style will change the title bars, borders, push buttons, scrollbars, Start bar, Start menu, and virtually every other part of the Windows GUI.SkinStudio 6 represents a complete rewrite of previous versions of SkinStudio.  The new version is designed to make it much easi...

Possibly the coolest thing I've ever seen on my desktop is the new dynamic dream known as "Liquid Dream".  For users of Windows Vista Ultimate who have DeskScapes, Liquid Dream lets users combine their existing wallpaper with a water effect on top of it. Your wallpaper then appears to be under water with dripping effects and a reflection from above (that users can choose). And best of all, it does all this with hardly any impact on system resources thanks to the compositor in Windows Vista....

 June 2007TweakVista Public Beta begins Stardock and TweakVista.com have teamed up to create the ultimate Windows Vista tweaking  utility. If you have Windows Vista, you absolutely should try this out. The public beta is free.

[Get TweakVista Beta]Galactic Civilizations II: Dark Avatar 1.6 Released The highest rated PC game of 2007 has gotten its first major update of the year. Galactic Civilizations II: Dark Avatar includes a new graphics engine, new diplomacy UI, updated AI, new m...

I'm working on an article on the above topic.

Is it getting too hard for people to get into skinning?

Consider these items:

To make icons for Windows Vista now requires the icon author to invest in making 256x256 icons. When Windows 3.1 came out, 32x32 was the largest sized icon. A 256x256 icon has about as many pixels as a screenshot of a full-screen DOS VGA game did.Windows Media Player is incredibly complicated to skin for and the media player market is very fragmented. I use iTunes...

Pirate your own desktop with the new Pirate Suite from Stardock Design!

Stardock is pleased to announce the new Pirate Suite.  This suite of skins, themes, icons, wallpapers, cursors, gadgets and more can completely alter the way Windows looks and feels.

The suite includes: A WindowBlinds visual style An icon package with over 100 new icons! Two different wallpapers provided in many different resolutions Plus!

ObjectDock backgrounds (tabbed and normal) A new logon screen A new boo...

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: MAY 2, 2007The National Hockey League and Stardock Launch
Custom Team-Themed PC Desktops for Hockey Fans NHL and Stardock to Offer Custom Desktop Content for Fans on NHL.com, Individual Team Websites Plymouth, MI and New York, NY (May 2, 2007) – In an unprecedented marketing move by a professional sports league, the National Hockey League (NHL) has partnered with Stardock Corporation, the world’s leading desktop enhancement company, to bring the tradition of hockey e...

ObjectDock is a program that adds a skinnable dock to your Windows desktop.  It is one of the most popular desktop enhancement programs available. 

ObjectDock 1.9 is such a major update over 1.5 that it could have been called ObjectDock 2.0. In fact, there was a lot of internal debate on this with 1.9 being the compromise versioning!

So what's new in it?  Here is a list of changes from v1.5:

What's changed in ObjectDock 1.9 over 1.5:  Brand new awesome weather ...

Last year was another great year for skinning. Users from around the world created some incredibly fantastic skins.  Culturally, skinning is a great deal different today than it was back in the late 90s.  Back then, a popular skin might get a 1000 downloads. I remember when the first "Aqua" skins came out and the infamous "WinAqua" from Dangeruss managed to get 5 THOUSAND downloads total which was, back 2000 or so, a real milestone. Now, downloads of 50,000 are common and most of the t...

Windows Vista has some awesome looking icons.  Microsoft went way out of its way to try to give Windows Vista a truly polished look.  They did this by giving most icons a 256x256 icon.  Think about how large that really is. Each Windows Vista icon has an image of that resolution.

But as good as they are, what if you want to change them? How do you do it?  Windows Vista maintains the ability to change the icons of individual short-cuts and folders though in very inconsisten...

IconPackager is a program that allows users to change all (or nearly all) the icons in Windows by applying "packages" of icons.  Way back long ago, it was the very first program designed to do this on Windows. 

Over the years, the demands of icon artists have grown.  When IconPackager was first released in early 1999, icons came in two basic sizes -- 32x32 with 16 colors and 16x16 with 16 colors.  With the release of Windows Vista, icons support 256x256 true color, alpha ...

ObjectDock is the world's most popular dock program for Microsoft Windows.  The freeware program allows users to place a dock on any edge of the Windows screen and react to mouse events. Users can choose to display running tasks as well as program short-cuts.  A "plus" version adds multiple docks, tabbed docks, system tray support and more.

Right behind WindowBlinds, it is one of the most popular desktop enhancement programs available on Windows.  It has almost 3.5 million down...

OverviewWindowBlinds is a program for Microsoft Windows that enables users to change the look and feel of the Windows GUI.  By look and feel, we mean literally change the way title bars, push buttons, the Start bar, scrollbars, and nearly every other element of the interface of Windows.  These changes are then inherited by the programs running on your system to deliver a consistent look across most of your programs.

WindowBlinds changes the look and feel by applying skins (called vi...

Alex Kipman from Microsoft has posted a series of tips on WindowsUltimate.com on how to make a good animated wallpaper. The highlights include:

From a content perspective:

Keep the camera angle static, so no zooming, panning etc or people will either puke or turn you off after a few seconds Try to bring interest in the top quarter and bottom quarter of the video so that you can get motion coming through the glass surfaces in Vista Keep the loop to about ~30 seconds in length Make sure...

With the release of Windows DreamScenes, Microsoft has made animated wallpapers on Windows a practical reality. Windows DreamScenes enables users to play video as their desktop background which, when done correctly can provide spectacular results.

Windows DreamScenes, available only on Windows Vista Ultimate, makes full use of the new DWM's video acceleration to deliver high definition backgrounds that won't slow your computer to a crawl.  The caveat is that the video driver makers need ...