How many of you are finding a growing gap between the net savvy and those who don't spend much time or at least don't use the Internet as an efficient way of gathering information? This article talks about the growing gap between the "information gods" and "information mortals". The net is a real liberating mechanism. You have the ability to talk to exactly the kinds of people you want regardless of location (whereas in "real life" their physical location has more to determine whether you han...
After a long development gestation, PocketBlinds 1.0 has been released. PocketBlinds is a program that completely skins Windows CE (title bar, push buttons, menus, radio buttons, etc.). Over the course of the last few months PocketBlinds has been rewritten to make use of new extension features in the latest version of Windows CE. The result is that it is able to skin any recent PocketPC with no visible performance hit. If you have a PocketPC, grab it now.
The fastest, best way to get skins, themes, icons, and wallpapers is not by surfing some slow website to do it (ahem) but by directly connecting to the underlying database of a skin site. That's what the WinCustomize skin browser does. It lets you search on skins at lightning speeds, browse through hundreds of wallpapers, skins, and themes very quickly and can APPLY skins and themes directly and even download the software you need if you're missing it. The 1.0 release candidate is ...
Thanks to WinCustomize subscribers, we've been able to order a new Dual 2.4Ghz server to help run the site. Any slowness on WinCustomize you experience presently isn't due to bandwidth but is rather because we've maxed out the CPUs on our servers. This new one will hopefully make a significant difference. If you're not a WinCustomize subsriber and want to help support the site visit here: https://www.wincustomize.com/store.asp
Cool Desk is a virtual desktop manager. Ever wish to have several screens on your computer? Cool Desk creates up to 9 virtual desktops and allows you to have different windows in each of them. The desktop manager window has a skinnable interface and allows you to switch from one desktop to another with a single mouse click. You can easily minimize, maximize, close, move from one desktop to another and even drop windows to the system tray area (near the clock) using the dockable "Windows ma...
WindowFX adds a ton of new special effects for Windows XP users. So what does WindowFX 2 look like in action? Try out this video: https://www.stardock.com/video/windowfx1.wmv This video was done a 1Ghz Pentium 3 system with a Geforce 2 card (Detonator 40 drivers).
Click on the screenshot on the left to get a look at the new WinCustomize suite for subscribers. If you're not a subscriber click here: https://www.wincustomize.com/store.asp
UNBELIEVABLE. In a poll that asked "If Windows ceased to be an option, what OS would you then go to?" the results were tied between MacOS X and Linux. With nearly 1600 votes in MacOS X received 724 votes, Linux received 723 votes. OS/2 got 45 votes and BeOS got 28 votes. So if Steve Jobs could get Windows out of the way, he might stand to pick up half of the users! The fact that half of Windows users would be willing to leave the PC entirely to go to MacOS is impressive. On th...
Lots of goodies for subscribers. First: The first WinCustomize subscriber premium suite is now available. Here's a screenshot: https://www.stardock.com/products/odnt/odnt-oct02a.jpg. This suite includes a WindowBlinds visual style by Alexandrie. A ObjectBar theme (with hotkey support) by me. And a full icon suite by Paul Boyer that makes full use of Windows XP alpha blending (it's awesome). Second: A new release candidate of the WinCustomize skin browser is now available for subsc...
Our last poll asked what people thought of blogs. Most people turned out not to know what a blog is. Blogs have been around for years. They're essentially personal journals. But in recent times, the software and infrastructure to make them has gotten so good that critical mass has been achieved and we now have an explosion of these web logs (blogs for short). Many blogs are actually becoming popular enough to serve as an alternative to the "mainstream" media. This has made those who feel that...
There were 6 options: 1) Going to war with Iraq needs to be done. 2) Hopefully a peaceful solution can be found but if Iraq doesn't let the inspectors back in unconditionally (really) then the US/UK needs to be able to launch military action even without the UN. 3) The UN needs to be the mechanism in which all dealings with Iraq are handled. 4) Bush and his cowboy diplomacy is the problem here. 5) This is just a scheme by Bush to help out his oil buddies. 6) Iraq is a sovereign n...
Popular Mechanics is a magazine that has talked about near future or distant future technologies since the early 20th century. Here's a link to their cover gallery. It's worth a look. http://popularmechanics.com/albums/index.phtml?dispsize=640
Stardock Magazine: September 2002 https://www.stardock.com ## Contents ## • Editorial • IconPackager 2.02 • LogonStudio 1.0 release candidate • WinCustomize Skin Browser • WindowBlinds 3.41 • Galactic Civilizations Beta 2 Preview • September 11th remembered ## Editorial ## by Brad Wardell What the heck happened to summer??? It’s just about here. Time to move to Australia where it’s starting to head into Spring. Lots of exciting things happening here. The lab has a...
Stardock has released the WinCustomize Skin Browser (WSB) to the general public. WSB is a program that talks directly to the WinCustomize.com library database to allow users to instantly access the thousands of icons, themes, skins, wallpapers, and more on their computers. Not only does it make it easy to access all that content, it can directly apply it to your system. So a user who finds a good Windows Media Player skin can simply press the "Apply" button and WSB will download and a...
The September Archive of WinCustomize Magazine is now available for viewing: https://www.joeuser.com/wcmag/sept2002/ The October issue will be coming out soon. If you have an account here, you should already be getting it by default. If you don't have an account, create an account and click on the checkbox to receive it.