Tomorrow I'm gone for vacation for a few days. Going to South Padre Island down in the gulf of Mexico. My first vacation in 2 years. Pity it's only for 4 work days.

So the GUI Olympics is coming to a close. Man that took a long time. I don't know if we'll ever do another one or not. It's a lot of work. The User's Choice Awards came out this week. They essentially mirrored the judges. What was particularly ironic is that on the Winamp side, the users chose essentially the same skins the judges did despite the shrieking from certain Winamp users of the idiocy and other charges on the part of the judges for not recognizing the genius in some of the other Winamp skins. Make sure you visit www.guiolympics.com to see all the results (best team, best skin, etc.).

Best Teams and individual skins and such can be found HERE.

If it weren't 9pm I'd put up some screenshots of the upcoming ObjectDock Plus.  But then again, if I had more time, I would have announced that ObjectDock 1.02 (freeware) was released a bunch of "little fixes" in it. ObjectDock Plus is going to rock though. It has, amongst other things, tabs, skinnable system tray docks, a Start menu, fan-out menus, multiple docks, multiple monitor support, and a bunch of other neat things. For the Plus version (which will probably be around $20 to register -- ObjectDock itself will remain freeware), our goal was to make something very useful and not just a toy.

Also this week Object Desktop users were treated to WindowBlinds 4.38. Don't let the version fool you though, something significant is in this new version that we aren't talking about yet. If all goes well, we'll talk about what is new in it a great deal. But for now, we'll be interested in finding out if people find it even faster than 4.3 was.

In last week's poll about DesktopX, a lot of people had no idea what IconX is. Okay, in a nutshell, IconX is a feature in DesktopX to enhance your existing desktop icons. When you enable it, your desktop icons can be made any size you want, have shadows under them and even zoom and and out as you put your mouse over them. It's incredibly slick.  You can see it for yourself and it's a free download. www.desktopx.net

I was on NPR this week and CNBC last week doing interviews with regards to The Political Machine. We expect to go gold this week with it for an August release.

Apologies for not getting around to doing a new Stardock TV yet.

When I get back, some of the WinCustomize version 4 features should be almost ready to beta test. Just as the launch of the original site was controversial, there will probably be some controversy about the new site features. One of the features we hope to put in there is to enable a way for skinners with Master access level to submit skins, suites, icon packages, etc. as premium content that they can, in turn, get paid for.  After all, we are constantly hearing from certain users how wrong it is for skinners not to get paid. We agree! Though we hope that this system will result in net increase of free skins too.  After all, to get to Master access one has to go from Citizen to Apprentice, Apprentice to Master Apprentice, Master Apprentice to Journeyman, and Journeyman to Master. And to do that one has to contribute a great deal to the community.  Quite a few skinners will get promoted to Master when I get back so that we can start a pilot program on this.  But this should be a win-win for everyone. And while some other skin sites have had to move to bundling spyware with their skins and wallpapers and such, WC's cut of premium skins should enable WinCustomize to afford to keep growing and avoid doing pop up ads or any other annoying revenue generating tactic. And best of all, skinners will have a way to get even more back than just fame and adulation, they'll be able to make enough money to upgrade their software, buy new hardware, or who knows what else depending on how well it does.

Speaking of WinCustomize v4, it's going to include a lot of article writing features and blogging. We want to encourage people to create tutorials and tips and tricks articles.  After all, if a half-literal dolt like me can whip up Stardock TV in a few hours each month, imagine what people with actual talent could do.  WC4 will be set up in such a way to help those people syndicate their work to millions of people.  A lot of the focus is going to be put on the people who "Create stuff". We want to do a lot more than we have thus far to highlight those who make sites like these possible.

Also this week Galactic Civilizations: Altarian Prophecy was released (and yes, when WC4 comes and people can write their own articles they can shamelessly promote the other stuff they work on too! <g>).

One thing I would like to find out about is why people on WinCustomize don't comment very much on news items or forums.  I mean, over at the site I news moderate (Neowin.net) articles get tons of comments.  But here, even though WinCustomize gets nearly 3 million unique visitors each month, a typical news item will only get a couple of comments.

Well that's about all for now.  BTW, if you're interested in writing articles and getting them read by a lot of people, make sure you check out www.joeuser.com. It's a free blog site we've put together that has features no other blog site on the Internet has. One advantage it has is that it auto-promoted good articles so your writings won't languish in total obscurity necessarily.

See you next week! I'll be sunning with the wife and kids!