A few days ago, we announced the Most Usable Dream winners, and today we announced  the Most Original Dream Winners!  The animated wallpapers (.dreams) that were submitted to the 2008 GUI Champs were just spectacular, and congratulations goes out to this round of winners.

Link: Most Original Dream Winners

The latest Master Dream on WinCustomize is an especially cool one.  Stars by Neil Banfield is  a new dynamic .dream featuring a background of “stars” moving toward you.  You can adjust many of the setting including the size and speed of the stars, and you can even apply your own background to the stars.  Being that this is a dynamic .dream, CPU usage should be very minimal.

WinCustomize subscribers get a 20% discount off Master skins, so be sure to grab this one for you and your friends.

Today is the final day to enter an submission into our Christmas Holiday Winky Challenge.   The contest is simple. 

Create a Christmas and/or Winter Holiday version of Winky that we can use for news postings, articles, etc.  You can simply take the image above and use that as your base, or design an entire new image.  Please note this is not replacing our mascot, it’s just a challenge to “dress him up†a bit for the holidays and have a bit of fun. 

See this thread for more info.  Voting will start tomorrow!

Master Skinner Brewman has given a major update to the Relent skin, bringing it up to version 2.   This is a great update, and Relent is a very clean and detailed skin.  It’s perfect for everyday use, and I highly recommend it.  This WindowBlinds skin has substyles for both Windows XP and Vista.

The skin also includes wallpapers, ObjectDock background, and a desktop widget.  If you are a WinCustomize subscriber, you get a 20% discount off Master skins.

A new month means it’s time for our team of excellent moderators to get together, and give    their picks of their favorite skin from November. 

There is a great variety of picks from them this time around.

Snowman picks New Circles by madcat21

â€Though madcat21 got off to a rough start, this skin is the perfect example that one should never give up! If he keeps this progress up I predict a bright future for this excellent artist!â€

WOM went with Loco Moon by ahabkaba

â€A very unique wallpaper, somewhat space age.  Liked this one the first time I saw it.â€

HG_Elminator picks Nightlit by starone

†A wonderfully dark and shiny Master skin. Starone does it once again, bringing her style to yet another awesome WB.â€

Lantec chose Winters Glow by Tippytoenail

â€This one's nice enough to frame and hang on my living room wall.â€

Zubaz picks Encounter MyColors by PixelPirate

â€There's a craftsmanship to some skins that transcends the ordinary.  This skin has that.  It has a simple elegance that belies the detail that makes it great.   Also, the startmenu animation rocks.â€

The first round of winners for the 2008 GUI Championships have been announced!  For a week, users were able to vote for the Most Usable Dreams, and we are happy to announce the winners for this category.

Click to see the winners!

Winners: Most Usable Dreams

December is here!  With that means we have started a new Desktop Screenshots thread in the WinCustomize forums to show off your current desktop.  Browsing the thread this morning, I already see quite a few Christmas desktop, and a bunch of skins from the 2008 GUI Champs.

Take a screenshot and post it to the thread!

We are in the final stretch folks.  This Friday, December 5th is the deadline to submit Icons and WB Skins for the Most Usable & Most Unique events in both categories.  At 11:59pm EST on the 5th, we will lock the ability to upload new skins/icons, as well as the ability to modify already posted ones, so if you have any last-minute updates, get them in soon.

Judging will happen next Monday, and user voting will begin on Tuesday. 

The IconPackager event is absolutely insane this year!  Island Dog just did a quick round-up on some of the latest GUIC Icon Entries and there's no doubt that the competition will be fierce.  Judging these is going to be really tough.

For WindowBlinds, I know a lot of you are putting the finishing touches on your work, but don't wait too long to submit!  I know some of the biggest WB skinning names in the community are furiously working on their entries, so by the end of the week we should have some awesome skins to pick from too.

Results for the Dream events will be announced Tuesday (Usable) and Thursday (Original).

After a short break, we have a bunch of new submissions in the 2008 GUI Champs.  I am  especially amazed at the level of detail that is going into some of these icon packs.  I’d really be interested in finding out how long it’s taking some of these artists to make these icons.

Here are a few of the latest additions, and you can see more icons, along with .dreams and WindowBlinds skins at www.guichamps.com.

Zubaz has labored over the holiday weekend to come up with a tutorials on the rrecently  updated Theme Manager 3.  This tutorial covers one of the coolest aspects of this application, which is the ability to create suites that are compiled via “links†to the skins on WinCustomize.

You can get Theme Manager 3 now by becoming an Object Desktop subscriber.

Link: A call to the ScreenShotters