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.

The WinCustomize CD is now available! It contains most of the skins on WinCustomize that we have permission to distribute -- over 600 megs of skins, themes, and icons. It also comes with two, never before seen skin suites made by Alexandrie and Treetog. The skin suites include skins for most of the sections on the site. Proceeds from the sales of the CD go to pay for the bandwidth used by WinCustomize.

Stardock has released a new version of its popular GUI customization software, WindowBlinds. WindowBlinds allows users to completely change the Windows GUI to look however they want it to look (like another operating system or something completely different). The program also allows users to add new buttons to the title bar such as roll-up buttons, MP3 controls, program shortcuts, and more. Version 2.2 is significantly faster than the previously public version (2.12 released last Winter)...

Here are this month's website results: Contrary to what we believed and said at the end of last month, traffic increased significantly this month. Traffic was up an additional 26% this month to around 170,000 unique daily visitors and 351,000 total visitors (up from 271,000 visitors in May). Around 60% of the users who came to WinCustomize came from bookmarks or typed it in. Leaving 40% of the users to come from other websites. To stress again, referrals are the lifeblood of ...

Dangeruss's Liquid 2 skin became the first skin on WinCustomize to reach over 100,000 downloads! Congratulations to Dangeruss!

For all you would be webmasters out there interested in paying for that bandwidth, there's a really good article that talks about different ways of generating income from your website to pay the bills.

WinCustomize is accepting T-shirt designs, logo designs, etc. If we use them in something, we'll pay you $100 plus give you a few shirts or mugs or hats or whatever it's used on to give to friends and family. Just submit your designs to the Graphics area, the T-shirt ideas is a catch-all. Anything you think might be cool on something is possible. Shirts, hats, mugs, etc.