If you live in places where it's cold in the winter then you know that Fall is starting to approach. And we learned something - that hiding under ones desk in the fetal position will not stop the weather from changing. Fall is on the way and there's nothing we can do about that.

But that's okay, because there's a lot to look forward to this Fall. Customization fans will actually see more new things this Fall than any previous season in the past.  We're working on a whole version of WinCustomize. Total rewrite from scratch. And in features, it'll be quite revolutionary. Skinners will be able to win awards, track their popularity in details never before done.

For example, my skins have been downloaded 1,927,194 times making me the 5th most popular skinner of all time. But it doesn't stop there, I can even see that my wallpapers have been downloaded 7,842 times giving me a rank of 263rd in wallpapers and I'm the 6th most popular WindowBlinds skinner, the 90th most popular logon maker, and the top ObjectBar themer. The average rating I give skins is a 6 out of 10. And I'll also be able to find out how many sites refer to my mini-site on WinCustomize and my rank there too.  You'll be able to create your own blogs, have personal galleries, manage all your skins, see what articles and posts and skins I'm participating on, and more.  That's just one thing this Fall.

Meanwhile, the widget wars (see article on this here to learn more) will begin in full. The teams are lining up and the battle for the desktop will begin in earnest.  Windows Media Player 10 has also just been released and what new skinning features in it will begin showing up soon enough as well.  New skinnable programs like XFire should also start making their presence.

And of course, the king of all skinning programs, WindowBlinds, has 4.4 in final testing now with 4.5 slated for late Fall with new features and new levels of performance.

So there's a lot to look forward to this Fall -- even if the weather is bad.
 

Imagine this fantasy scenario: The wallpaper masters of Digital Blasphemy, Mason Fischer, famous PC game music/sound composer, top DesktopX Skinner Tiggz, and Stardock all teaming up to create a desktop program unlike anything ever seen before.

That's what the Natural Desktop is. A new program that looks at the time of day, time of year, and the weather and then changes your wallpaper to one of twenty some megabytes of included wallpapers created by Digital Blasphemy and plays an original audio sound track based on the time of day/weather along with a fully animated display of the current weather (and not just some sprites moving around but a truly dynamic weather display).

Screenshots won't do it justice. The sounds are really half the story. For those of you who spend more time in doors than you might wish, the Natural Desktop's sound track is of particular interest as natural sounds (birds chirping, cicadas humming, crickets creeking, rain falling -- all based on the time of day and weather) are played (which can be enabled and disabled).  What's also nice is that it doesn't interefere with your other desktop enhancement programs. You can still use WindowBlinds or DesktopX or your favorite media player. It has also been designed to use a minimum of overhead (someone with a P3-600mhz system should have no problem running this without it affecting their games or app performance at all).

(editorially) This is one of the coolest things we've ever seen and heard and once you use it, the question really becomes - why hasn't someone made something like this before?(end editorial)

You can learn more about it and purchase it for only $8.95 at [www.naturaldesktop.com]

The Oxidized Desktop includes:

• A WindowBlinds visual style that will change your title bars, push buttons, scrollbars, toolbar icons, progress animations, Start bar and more.
• A full icon package to change all your icons to new "oxidized" look.
• The Oxidized wallpaper
• Oxidized Media Player
• Oxidized Clock, Calendar, and Weather monitor
• Oxidized System Meter
• Oxidized Program launcher
• Oxidized BootSkin
• Oxidized ObjectDock Plus skin

[Oxidize your desktop now!]

You may already be familiar with ObjectDock. It is a freeware program that lets you manage your programs in a "dock" and does so very slickly.  ObjectDock Plus adds a bunch of new features such as Tabbed Docks, System Tray support, Taskbar grouping, fly-out menus, More skinning options, Multiple docks, multiple monitor support, Hot spots, and more.

Users of the freeware dock have also benefited as features have been put in to make it work better with computer games (example: ObjectDock used to activate itself if you had it set to activate on mouse moving to edge. A nice feature unless you're playing DOOM 3 and move your mouse down only to have the dock come up -- now it can tell if you're playing a full screen game and ignore the mouse movement so you're not interrupted).

[Get ObjectDock Plus]

But DesktopX is mainly about three things:

1. Adding objects (think "super icons") to your Windows desktop.
2. Creating mini-applications called "widgets"
3. Building customize desktops.

DesktopX is part of Object Desktop. See bottom of the magazine to see how to purchase that.

Check it out: [http://www.desktopx.net]

[WIDGET WARS]

 [Get IconX]

[Stardock TV: September 2004]