August is usually the low point of skinning. People are outside -- or trying to be outside. And to losers like me, who look outside at the sun, it's a reminder that we're slowly evolving into vampires or something. Thankfully, programs like Natural Desktop help give us the illusion that we're outside enjoying the summer. But luckily for me, I'm not the only one indoors because August was the best month for WinCustomize.com on record. We make break the 20 million visitor mark in August. The graph data is only until August 27 so there's still 4 more days to go on it for the month. It's a pretty far cry from just a few years ago when we were just breaking the 1 million mark.
The most popular skin of the month has been Kol's Longhorn visual style. It gives a pretty close approximation to the Windows Vista look and feel. The popular skin downloads charts are publicly accessible. So here are some things I found on the site that I thought were pretty interesting.
Boot Screens (you need to get www.bootskin.com to use these). This month was particularly good for boot screens. Check these out!
There were a lot of other really good ones this month so it was tough to narrow it down to just these.
It was also a good month for Extended mouse cursors. You need CursorXP for those.
Meanwhile, over in DesktopX land things are still a bit of a confusing mess. For the record, DesktopX OBJECTS are supposed to be desktop objects. Little animated icons and other goodies. If they have functionality - like a mini-program - they should be uploaded as a widget.
Some DesktopX widget that really caught my eye include:
Over on the icon front, August was pretty quiet actually. Incidentally, make sure you have IconPackager 3 so that you can apply the new packages.
Some particularly noteworthy icon packages included:
It was a particularly good month for wallpapers and I'm going to only be able to scratch the surface here. So here are a selected few that I really enjoyed.
And that's just a few of them!
Meanwhile, in the WindowBlinds area, a bunch of new skins to change the look & feel of your Windows GUI have arrived including (wait for it) Driftwood (an update to my all time favorite skin).
Some other interesting skins this month:
So that's all for this month. WinCustomize is looking for moderators btw to help moderate skins and the forums. If you're interested and already have at least Master Apprentice access, drop me a line at bwardell@stardock.com. I probably won't be able to respond right away as I'm always way behind on email but I will read it at some point. 
Cheers! 
