With the earthquake in central China this week and the number of our community members who have been affected by the disaster, plus the recent cyclone in Myanmar, we've been asked by several folks about doing something in the way of donations or aid, as a community, to help out the victims of the recent disasters. 

While we've done our own charity drives in the past, such as the Childs Play drive last year, because of the immediacy of the need for relief in these regions, we wanted to step aside and encourage people to donate directly so the money gets where it's needed faster.

One organization through which you can donate money is the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, the world's largest humanitarian organization.  It is an aid organization with no ties to nationality, race, religion of political platform.  Their goal is to get aid to those who need it around the globe, no matter their situation.

The IFRC has a donation page on their website that will allow you to specify exactly which disaster you want to donate money to.  It defaults to the China Earthquake fund on the form, but you can select any of the 9 listed options when donating.

If you're able, please do what you can to help.  With the death toll in China already at 22,000 and climbing, and in Myanmar estimated as high as 128,000, the need for aid is enormous.

If you do not want to donate through the IFRC, but have another charity you prefer to donate to that is providing aid to these disasters, please feel free to share a link and description in the comments below.  It doesn't matter how the help gets there, so long as it does.

Well, it looks like Island "No New Taxes" Dog tore himself away from The Political Machine 2008 long enough to actually do his weekly skins roundup for us.  And despite him putting the preview together between turns in the game, it turned out pretty well  and is just packed with great skins this week.

On display this week are two Impulse related skins, a dream by CarGuy1, a dock, some dock icons, a wallpaper and an updated JJ Ying WindowBlinds skin.  This is probably one of the best weeks we've had in quite a while.  Hit up the article to see all of the great skins, you might have overlooked one or two of these during the week.

With the impending full launch of Impulse, we've been having some fun with Impulse-related skins.  Yesterday, Seabass posted an Impulse themed cursor set he's been working on in his spare time (yes, in addition to providing fine technical support, he also does 3d art and animation).

The Impulse cursor set is built for CursorFX and is packed with animations.  If you watch the ball closely, you'll see that the core shown through the lightning bolt cut-out is constantly in motion.

Give the set a try, it's definitely a cool one.

Stardock is proud to announce the release of IconPackager 4. IconPackager allows users to easily, and safely, change nearly all of the Windows icons at once using icon "packages".  IconPackager 4 has been through quite the overhaul, one of which is the most noticeable is the completely new user interface.

There are hundreds of these packages available for download on WinCustomize.   Creating or modifying an icon pack is as simple as drag and dropping your own icons.  Users of Windows Vista will certainly appreciate the feature updates in IconPackager 4. 

Some of these include:

1. Completely new UI.
2. The ability to upscale pre-Vista icons.
3. Vista users can set Live Folder icons independently of the icon package.
4. Recoloring feature to easily change icon colors on-the-fly.

A free trial download is available.  IconPackager 4 is available for $19.95, and is part of the Object Desktop suite of desktop enhancements.   Existing users of IconPackager can upgrade for $9.95.

Link: IconPackager 4

Every so often I get an e-mail or PM asking what the user levels on WinCustomize mean, and how people go about getting promoted.  So instead of continuing to write one-off responses, I've put up what I hope is a clear and definitive guide to the WC user levels, what they are, what benefits they hold and how the moderators go about selecting folks for promotion, and what we consider when making the final decision.

I encourage everyone to take a quick look over the article, see where they are on the ladder, and figure out maybe what you need to do if you want to continue to move up. 

If you have any questions, toss them on the article comments.

Island Dog has put together another great screencast.  This time, it's an introduction to ObjectDock Plus.  The video walks you through the differences between ObjectDock and ObjectDock Plus.  Topics covered are dock customization,  tabbed docks, the weather docklet, adding shortcuts, icons, custom flyouts and even how to use ObjectDock as a complete task bar replacement.

Check out the full screencast here.

Last week I posted a little preview of the upcoming changes to the WC Help page.  The idea was to make the page easier to navigate, easier to read, more inviting/friendly and give us the ability to expand on the help resources we could provide on the page.  The old help page was just a bunch of link lists that weren't very organized and hadn't been updated in years.  The format of the page and the content itself basically ensured that virtually no one would use it.  We also didn't have a very good link between the Help page and the WinCustomize Wiki.

Today, I'm very happy to launch the first version of the new WinCustomize Help Center!

Please take a stroll through it.  Click the links and let me know:

1. Any bugs on that page.
   Issues such as broken links, wacky formatting errors, images floating in the wrong spots etc. 
2. Links you think should be added
   Am I missing a key tutorial?  Essential articles?  Items that you think should definitely be included but aren't currently.
3. Any other misc feedback.

Please keep in mind that this is not a full-fledged help system with all sorts of fancy features.  It's just a really long HTML page with sections I'm hiding and unhiding depending on what you click on.  It is pretty easily expanded and modified though, so I can make reasonable additions fairly quickly.

Huge thanks to: andrew_ & nauticalpixel for all their CSS help, DoctorNick for fixing some annoying JS bugs, and the folks in #stardock for helping test early versions of this page.

WinCustomize is home to skinners from around the globe, and as we've realized in recent years, a large part of our community comes from China.  As reports continue to come in about the damages caused by the earthquake in central China we wanted to take a moment today to reach out to all of our affected community members; forum goers and skinners alike.

We'd like you to, when you can, drop us a note on this thread to let everyone know you're OK.  Also, if you've spoken to any other community members who can't get to a PC to post, pass along any news you have of them as well.

To the rest of our community around the globe, please take a moment to send a prayer/some positive thoughts to all of those impacted by the disaster.

You're all in our thoughts here at Stardock.

Master Skinner and former site moderator gef is back with some brand new free DesktopX themes for your skinning enjoyment.  Classic is designed for 1680x1050 resolution only, while Evolve will work for either 1680x1050 or 1280x1024.

Oh, and he also tossed out a new RightClick theme...

Give them a try and let gef know what you think!

Long-time skinner and recently returned to WinCustomize after a long hiatus, APB has put out a second fantastic WindowBlinds Skin: Sirach

Using a definite DeviantArt color scheme/feel, Sirach is an XP-only WB skin (Vista version coming soon) that takes advantage of virtually everything WB6 has to offer on XP.  Varying transparencies, overlapping glass panels, slightly rounded buttons, and excellent highlighting make this a must-try skin for everyone still running WinXP.

Give the skin a try!