Microsoft has brought back veteran product closer, Chris Jones to manage the Longhorn project. Chris Jones was one of the primary forces behind getting Whistler (Windows XP) out the door. He replaces Joe Peterson in managing Longhorn's day to day movement towards release. "Chris Jones…was brought back from COSD to save the (Longhorn) product," said one source. Longhorn has seen a number of features removed during its beta journey including WinFS, the Business Framework, the Side ba...

DirectX started out as a rogue operation at Microsoft.  Back in 1995, the future of gaming at Microsoft was something called WinG.  But a group of renegades at Microsoft had a different vision and created DirectX.  Now, at 10, DirectX has evolved into quite a powerful, fully featured, game development environment. GameDaily Biz has an interview with Chris Donahue at Microsoft over the past and future of DirectX and what it'll mean as Longhorn approaches.

Paul Boyer has concluded his icon-a-day series, the most extensive on-line icon creation tutorial ever!   And as an encore, he has packaged them up using IconPackager 3 (which, btw, is a free upgrade for IconPackager 1/2 users). Icon Package Icon-A-Day Tutorial Index

Microsoft is announcing the results of a long-running study that pits Linux vs. Windows 2003 Server and finds Microsoft Windows to have an overall lower cost of ownership and better security. Wipro surveyed 90 companies in the U.S. and Western Europe with 2,500 to 113,000 employees where both the Windows and open source operating systems were simultaneously being run. When the costs of updating are distributed across the size of the environment and evaluated on a per-asset basis, the study shows...

Microsoft is planning to support RSS in many of the programs it will be bundling with Longhorn such as the much anticipated IE 7.  But is this a good thing? Some fear Microsoft will end up embracing and co-opting the RSS standard. Read the whole thing.

If you look at the bottom right of the main page, you'll notice that the polls have returned! (er correction, bottom left ).

(eeerie voice) What..is..the..secret..of..the..Intel..Mac...Whom..does..it...serve? (/eeerie voice) ThinkSecret has pictures and feedback on the first developer models of the Intel Mac! And 20 quadroons to the first person who recognizes the movie reference in above..  

Tom's Hardware has a full review of the next-generation nVidia GeForce card, the 7800 GTX. nVidia claims that the 7800 GTX has been re-designed from the ground up.  The GTX comes with 256MB of RAM, 24 pixel pipes, and 8 vertex shaders.  With 302 million transistors, the 7800 is the most advanced GPU ever.  Of course, bear in mind, ATI is about to launch their next-gen GPU shortly.  So it'll be interesting to see how the two stack up.

Microsoft-Watcher Mary Jo Foley has been the scurge of Microsoft since the mid 90s.  Back when I was an OS/2 developer, there'd be people in the office half-rooting/half-fearing what MJ would write next about the empire.  Now that Microsoft-Watch.com, her website/super-blog has taken off, her coverage of Longhorn has given many of Microsoft's advocates some heart burn. The problem Microsoft is having and that Mary Jo is reporting is that Longhorn has been a much more..organic de...

We're here for day 2 of deviantART Summit . Yesterday we met a lot of people from the community.  I did a class on how to create skins, icons, themes, etc. With me is Mormegil, author of many of the most popular icon packages on the net.  He's been doing live icon creation demos here at the Stardock booth. I've also been taking some video which I'll put up as soon as I get a way to transfer them to the computer.  

Today and tomorrow at the Hollywood Palladium the first annual deviantART Summit is taking place. If you live in the LA area, come up and see it, it's looking pretty good. I'm there, Moremgil is here, Cordellia is here, and lots of other people from the community. We have a booth here along with companies such as Adobe, Corel, Linspire, and many others. Watch this space for photos and updates on what's happening.

Stardock is moving next week. It probably won't disrupt things too much here at WinCustomize.com but after 7 years being based in Livonia Michigan, Stardock has purchased a building over in Plymouth Michigan and is migrating to it. So if we seem a bit out of touch next week, that's why.  The network setup is being done while we move which should make things as seamless as possible.

The command prompt hasn't undergone much change in the past decade.  In fact, it's still less powerful than OS/2's CMD.exe released back in 1991!  The command line interface to the Windows Server OS will be changed to the new Monad Shell (MSH), in a phased implementation to take place over the next three to five years. This confirmation comes from Microsoft senior vice president Bob Muglia in an interview published today by Microsoft.

You can now upload things for WinCustomize.com that only show up on the gallery of your personal page.  They won't show up in the general (public) galleries but if someone visits your personal page, they can see them there.  If you don't have a personal page, click on the site  link at the top.  We are also using this opportunity to go through the wallpaper section for things we previously rejected and making some of the submissions available on personal pages (and...

WindowBlinds 4.59 beta is now available for Object Desktop users.  WindowBlinds is a program that changes the look & feel of the Windows GUI (title bars, Start bar, push buttons, task panel, etc.).  The new beta version is testing out alpha blended glow effects.  MikeB's Tronnix is the first skin to test out this new feature. Skinners can effectively add light sources to buttons and other elements of the GUI.