We have such good stuff coming in on Fridays, it’s almost hard to keep up.  But hey, you have plenty of reading for the weekend, right?  Well since it is Friday, Zoomba has crawled out from his secret lair to give us the weekly Impulse updates.  The big news this week is the impending release of THQ titles on Impulse, and we also have some teaser screenshots of game rankings and achievements through Impulse.  

This weeks WinCustomize member spotlight goes to a member who is putting a bunch of time into skins, and sharing them with the  community.  That goes to PuterDudeJim.  PuterDudeJim has been a member of WinCustomize since late 2004, and currently holds the rank of Apprentice.  Jim contributes to a variety of galleries, but his DX themes also seem to catch my eye.  He does a fantastic job at creating DX themes to match some popular WindowBlinds skins, but also comes up with a bunch of original skins as well. 

Take a browse through his gallery and I’m pretty confident you will find something to your liking.

Here are some of my favorite skins from PuterDudeJim.

What a long week it has been.  The final preparations are in for the GUI Champs ‘08, and we are set to begin in just a few days.  Halloween inspired skins are starting to make a big appearance, and skins in general are rolling in strong. I think the rest of the year is going to be superb!

Anyways, it is Friday and this weeks edition of This Week in Skinning is up!

We always like to show some love to the other skinning communities out there, and we wanted to say Happy Birthday to WinModify.com.  WinModify has been around for 5 years, and many of our WinCustomize members, including myself, upload their works there as well.  WinModify also helps us by promoting news and things of that sort for us, so I wanted to take a moment to thank them for their contribution to the community.

From WinModify:

“To celebrate this, we've opened up 2 sections: IconPackager and Vistart skins, we've also upped the max. preview size from 500KB to 1MB, and there's now also a zoom function for Bootscreens and Logonscreens.  So here's to another upcoming 5 years!

Again, thanks for all your support!”

Apple has been granted a patent for the MacOS dock.

Read the whole thing here.

Besides the general idea of a userbar with "a plurality of item representations" that consolidates features like "launching and managing running applications," the patent focuses particularly on the Dock's magnification feature that makes icons bigger as you sweep by them with a cursor.

Some may recall this article that points out that not only have docks been seen in operating systems for decades but that Stardock has been doing docks since 1994.

Look familiar?  Apple has every right to protect their inventions. But their innovation with regards to the Mac dock is extremely narrow.  Stardock doesn't patent its software as a rule for philosophical reasons. But the lack of a patent doesn't mean Stardock hasn't been heavily involved in creating prior art.

The new month means it’s time for a new edition of This Month in Dreams.  September saw a great amount of submissions to the .dream category, and it was very difficult to pick out the featured picks. I’m sure we are going to see some really phenomenal .dreams submitted to the GUI Champs, and I also bet we will se some really cool Halloween .dreams coming.

Check out This Month in Dreams.

As some of you might know, every month our dedicated moderators put together a list of their favorite skins from that month.  It’s always interesting to see what are the favorite skins of the people who are “behind the scenes”.  We have some really great picks this month, so here we go!

Bebi Bulma picks Wraith by SKoriginals “There aren't that many black blinds out there, and even then they're difficult to get done right. This one is very usable and has that "sinister" touch that adds a sort of wickedness to it. Would be great for a Halloween setup.” Erk also picked this skin. “I had the good fortune to be able to test this beautiful skin during its creation, and Shawn has done a brilliant job on it. Shawn spent a lot of time making this skin, and it shows in the quality of workmanship.”
Snowman picks Mysteria by KittyMalone ”Kitty's my skinning-godess...... Everything she released keeps amazing me, time and time again. This WB is definately not an exception. To bad she wasn't able to submit Mysteria in the GUIC. In my opinion it would have been a certain winner.”
WOM picks Twelve Apostles by Ausvet ”Nice blend of colors, looks like a painting.”
Lantec picks DarthRC1 by WegGizmos ”WebGizmos put out a collection of RightClick skins this month. This one's my favorite....lots of detail. All his submissions in RC show the same attention to detail as his Docks.”
HG_Eliminator picks Outer Limits by J. Aroche ”Built for his matching suite. J Aroche does it once again with Outer Limits for CursorFX. With stunning animations and dazzling style you cant go wrong with this cursor.”
Zubaz picks Media Processor 6.0 ”I am constantly amazed at the level of detail Vad_M puts into his work and this is no exception.  Both the art design and the functionality of this submission are amazing.  (It doesn't hurt that he likes the BeeGees either [check out the preview].)   Vad_M has been posting DX widgets since 2005 and keeps getting better all the time.”

Halloween is approaching, so I wanted to start featuring some Halloween inspired skins to help you get your “spooky” desktop going. There are a great amount of Halloween skins in the various galleries, but I thought I would start off with cursor themes for today.  To use these themes, you will need to download CursorFX, which is the best way to change the Windows cursors.

OK, the Mods have been out and about noticing people....[it's called 'collision avoidance'] and gave me a list of people to promote this month.....

Congratulations, one and all....

Apprentice:

• Cplair  http://cplair.wincustomize.com/
• AlMonty  http://montyxp.wincustomize.com/
• BK13Garbageman http://bk13garbageman.wincustomize.com/

Master Apprentice:

• Littleboy http://julien.wincustomize.com/

Journeyman:

• Skinhit  http://mylogic.wincustomize.com/