FileFront has conducted a battery of tests to determine the effects that WindowBlinds has on the performance of PC games. The results are pretty interesting and you can see them for yourselves at the FileFront site. Definitely worth checking out.

This month's Stardock TV takes a look at the GUI Olympics, widget making, DirectGUI and how to do other really cool things to your Windows desktop. Check it out!

Two new utilities have been released for WindowBlinds that can help users and skinners get even more out of the popular windows GUI skinning program. The first one, WBExec, was developed by one of the top plug-in authors in the software industry - MadIce. It enables skinners to add new title bar buttons that can open up menus and launch all kinds of different programs including the Start menu, Most recent files, Drive menu, and much more. For skinners looking to make visual styles tha...

Blog Navigator is a fully featured Internet article reader that reads in RSS feeds (most major sites have RSS feeds these days) and displays them in a clean interface to make it very easy and fast to read through tons of news. There are other RSS readers out there already, but Blog Navigator has a few features that, when combined, make it really stand out: 1) It automatically pre-fetches articles. That is, it caches articles you haven't read yet so that when you get to them, it's a...

DirectSkin is a programming extension for software developers to easily make their existing applications fully skinnable. It comes in the form of an OCX that along with a couple lines of lines of coded added by the developer enables that application to make use of a specific visual style on their program. DirectSkin has been used by dozens of companies to deliver branded application or to enable their application to have a Windows XP look and feel on non-XP platforms. The advantage D...

Check out this article on JoeUser.com for some details on the upcoming beta of The Political Machine...

The Goodyear Theme Manager includes themes for Goodyear’s new Assurance featuring TripleTred Technology™ and Assurance featuring ComforTred Technology™ tires. Each theme has a WindowBlinds visual style, one or more wallpapers, desktop Icon Packager set and the distinctive Goodyear branded Wingfoot mouse cursor powered by CursorXP technology. The themes were designed by the artists at the Buzzwerks Interactive Marketing, a division of Hitchcock, Fleming and Associates (HFA) Interactive Ma...

Stardock TV lets you see how you can do cool things with your desktop in video form. This month's episode focuses on IconPackager but also touches on how you can use Object Desktop to create the ultra-minimalistic looking desktop. Check it out!

If you already have an active subscription to ObjectDesktop.net you can now get Object Desktop 2004 on CD for free other than shipping/media costs.

Object Desktop 2004 Released Desktop Enhancement suite provides unprecedented ability to transform the look and feel of Windows For Immediate Release: Contact: Bradley Wardell (bwardell@stardock.com) Canton MI (Tuesday April 6, 2004) – Stardock released Object Desktop 2004 today. Object Desktop is a suite of desktop enhancement utilities that are designed to extend the base feature set of Microsoft Windows. The features of Object Desktop focus on giving users the ability to ...

Mike Gunderloy is a Contributing Editor for ADTMag, as well as being a developer and consultant in his own right. Here are his findings about DirectSkin from Stardock: "DirectSkin gives you a custom control (OCX) to handle the grunt work of skinning your application. You can use the control in any environment that supports COM controls (including .NET; it works fine via interop). Once you've added the control to your project, it takes 4 lines of code to initialize, and then 2 lines if...

All Stardock.net related services (including this site) will be down tonight while we do server maint.

The Political Machine announced For Immediate Release: Contact: Brad Wardell (bwardell@stardock.com) Phone: 734-762-0687 Canton MI – March 29, 2004. Stardock Entertainment, the makers of award-winning strategy games, announced The Political Machine today. The Political Machine is a strategy game in which players take on the role of campaign manager for a US Presidential candidate. In the game, players must campaign, raise money, take out advertisements, win endorsements, and ...

With more and more companies licensing skinning technologies, Stardock has launched SkinningSolutions, a blog that features articles explaining the benefits that can be achieved. The first article focuses on DirectSkin, an OCX that allows software developers to make their applications skinnable with as little as four lines of code. You can see how artists such as Skinplant create new looks for today's software programs.

So you have Windows XP and you want to tweak it up to change how it looks and feels and functions. What's out there that's free? What's out there that's not? This article talks about what Stardock offers in terms of functionality to change various parts of Windows XP.