Season 7 of The Clone Wars has started on Disney+! I'm excited for the final season!
March is already here and I wanted to give a wrap-up of what was happening on WinCustomize during the month of February. Stardock News: SoundPackager 10 released! "SoundPackager 10 adds cloud access to thousands of different sounds, along with a number of all-new sound packages designed to give Windows users additional choices in how their PC sounds. Users can also create their own sound packages to share with others via an in-app editor." New and Updated Mast...
Sonic the Hedgehog Smashes Box Office Expectations, Holds Record for Highest Opening Weekend of Any Video Game Movie EverParamount Pictures surpassed expectations with Sonic the Hedgehog this weekend, which opened to high praise from audiences and a gross of over $70 million domestically. Creators of the movie faced internet backlash last year when they revealed the initial design for the titular character. Director Jeff Fowler was quick to answer fans on Twitter after the initial bac...
There's all kinds of animated wallpapers (.dreams) available on WinCustomize, but my personal favorites are landscape scenery. Having a nice, relaxing nature landscape scene such as a beach or waterfall on the desktop is just amazing to look at. We've had some fantastic submissions lately so I wanted to take some time and highlight a few that I think will make a great addition to your desktop using DeskScapes. You can see many more in the DeskScapes gallery. Ocean Aquatics&nbs...
I'm looking at some creating some new posts like this and thought it might be useful to have a wrap-up post a couple of times a month that feature some skins, some tech news, and general goings on here at Stardock. I'll be tweaking the format so if you have any input or things you'd like to see, be sure to leave a comment below. Stardock News: SoundPackager 10 announced and beta is available for Object Desktop members! "SoundPackager allows Windows users to instantly change the def...
We’ve had some great discussions on Hard drive speeds over the years. One of my favorites was the one about whether SSDs was worth it. I’ve also been benchmarking my PC’s for a very, very long time: https://forums.wincustomize.com/168111 Here is a brief recap: ...
The biggest, most game changing feature of The Political Machine 2020 are the ideology trees. Each candidate can have their own ideology tree which makes Bernie Sanders play quite a bit differently than say Joe Biden. For today's entry, I am going to try out making a custom candidate and choose the Fascism ideology. I'm going to loosely base him off of one of my favorite villains of Stephen King's book, The Dead Zone. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEE141IC4Q8 We inc...
The Political Machine is a strategy/simulation game. What has made it so popular over the years is that while it is a game, it has a pretty serious and robust simulation running behind it. Most of the data is collected from a wide array census results, surveys and demographic research. Every four years when we update the data, we are constantly surprised on the changes we see in different states. The opioid epidemic is one example. This issue wasn’t on ...
The first month of the year is quickly coming to an end, so I'm back with some highlights of some of the newest Masters skins from this month. I can't always list every one in an article, so be sure to check the galleries daily for all the latest free and Master skins we get submitted to WinCustomize.com. https://www.wincustomize.com/explore/all Also take a look at the featured skins which should feature a new one each day, but here's a re-cap of the latest WindowBlinds skin! Wh...
As I mentioned yesterday, there is a really good use-case for the Surface Pro X as a device that uses Remote Desktop to your "main machine" when doing heavy lifting provided that it is sufficiently powerful enough to do light tasks on its own relative to say a Surface Pro 7. Now, this is for my purposes. YMMV. As you can see, for me, the Surface Pro X hardware has the edge over the Surface Pro 7. It's on the software support -- from Microsoft -- where...
This is my work station area at Stardock when I'm working in the Object Desktop area of the company which is located on the third floor of the building. As you can see, I have 3 monitors connected to a Surface Pro. The reason I'm up here is so that I can collaborate in person with the rest of my team. And the reason for the Surface Pro is that I frequently use it as a tablet for sketching on screenshots and designs. The only downside is that the Surface Pro 7, while quite power...
Dark mode has become popular for its eye and battery saving properties. I get daily updates from gHacks.net. Lo and behold, three days ago I got this email from them. The app works not just on W10 1803 and later, but also on Chrome and firefox. W10's dark mode can be accessed without this app, but it takes time, and frankly, this is easy-peasy: "Advantages of Easy Dark Mode: Enables quick switching between Light and Dark display modes in Windows 10.Selectable Hotkey.Fully suppo...
If you're interested in UX design, you will definitely want to keep up with what Microsoft is update to. https://www.microsoft.com/design/fluent/#/ Fluent is the name of Microsoft's new design language for Windows. Here is an example of Fluent design in action. As we get up for a major WinCustomize revamp, we are going to be taking cues from this design language to make the site more accessible, faster (much faster) and more modern. Stay tuned.
I love my Surface Pro. It doesn't always love me. This Summer, a firmware update caused the keyboard cover connector to not work anymore which forced me to use the Surface truly as a tablet. It wasn't...a good experience. While I wasn't a fan of Windows 8, it was a pretty decent touch OS. Windows 10...not so much. A big part of the reason Windows 10 isn't good for touch is that it doesn't use the screen edges well. Windows 10, by default, has these touch-based...
Bring "Zones" to your Windows 10 Touchscreens with TouchTasks!TouchTasks is a unique productivity app that lets you assign tasks to specific locations on the edge of your Windows touch screens. TouchTasks works by taking advantage of the fact that the touch sensitive area of a touch screen is larger than the display part of the screen. As a result, users can launch useful tasks by touching specified zones on the screen. By default, TouchTasks assigns the left middle edge of the touch sc...