Rumor has it that the next major beta build of Windows XP will have 2 alternative looks besides that blue Luna. All of the GUIs will have the new Luna look but with different color schemes.

From the Coolplayer home page: "Hi all! After the downfall of skinz.org and deskmod.com there is a new leading player in the skins business. It's WinCustomize.com and they have added a CoolPlayer Skins section! I hope all skinners will upload their old and new skins to this site, so it will live long and prosper!" Even after only a few days, thanks to the help of the community and in particular Ken Ray from Teknidermy, the section has over 20 skins and is actually catching up on W...

So here we have this scenario: Between 1998 and 2001 a zillion really neat websites are created at great expense. They then run out of funding and the companies go out of business or are forced to sell. The sites have a ton of traffic but the sites have no way to make money off that traffic. Enter in a handful of corporations who are making good money who snap up all these sites at bargain basement prices...

Many people may not know this but there's a really good skin site that has tons of sections: http://pcdesktops.emuunlim.com/ Check it out, it's really well done. It's fast, reliable and has a great interface.

Stardock has released a new beta of PocketBlinds, the first and only complete skinning solution for the PocketPC. Version 0.90b now skins the title bar, push buttons, and the menubar along with fixing bugs reported in previous versions. It also comes with some new skins that take advantage of the new features including a port of Dangeruss's Liquid2 skin.

In the past few months, we've all seen a lot of great websites go away due to lack of income. The problem those sites have is that they were relying on banner ads. Even Yahoo is having problems. A skin site is very expensive to run. In fact, as skinning has become increasingly popular, it's become even harder to have a good skin site. So the ultimate in cruel ironies -- the success of the skinning community has been effectively wiping out the skin sites. That's because downloading a ...

The Adrenaline vault has an indepth feature on Stardock's upcoming Drengin.net game network. Drengin.net is the gaming equivalent of ObjectDesktop.net which is where WindowBlinds, DesktopX, IconPackager and the rest come from. Stardock also released Stellar Frontier today (www.stardock.com) which is a free massively multiplayer action/strategy game. The Avault article talks about the games on it and the upcoming games being made.

DesktopX is nearing release after nearly a year of public testing and even longer of internal development. The new version fixes bugs and adds a host of new features not the least being having persistent objects (objects that you can choose to stay between themes). DesktopX is the ultimate shell extender. It's not a shell, it makes Explorer or Litestep or whatever have an object oriented theme model.

Since Deskmod went down, traffic to WinCustomize has increased dramatically. We were already pumping out several megabits per second before then and the recent increase in traffic has simply increased it. The irony is, as Windows customization gets more popular, the harder it becomes to have websites to support it because of the bandwidth. Since banner ads and such no longer pay for these kinds of sites, other ways to fund the site have to be found. Stardock provides WinCustomize with a b...

The public response to the WinCustomize CD has been so positive and the site had gotten so slow that we went ahead and trippled WinCustomize's bandwidth. Hopefully you can already tell the difference in the speed of the site.

The owner of LS2K.org reports that he may have to close his site in the coming weeks.

A cool little flash series is about to begin that looks pretty good. For all you martial arts people, this is a cool thing.

Stardock has released a free massively multiplayer space action strategy game called Stellar Frontier. In the game, you take command of a star ship and must help the empire you choose to side with conquer the galaxy. As your exploits grow, you gain in rank which gives you access to bigger and better ships.

This isn't completely new news but the full story from the Admins of Litestep.net have put up news. Litestep.net is down and looks like it'll be down for awhile. Visit the link to find out more.

It appears that eFront finally pulled the plug on skinz.org. It's gone.