Just so you know... when you'll notice a Father Christmas sitting on a chair in the local mall, it might have never crossed your mind that is't a hard and dangerous job of many people that leads to these short moments of joy and happiness that you and your children experience.



Fortunately the Woodpecker Film has taken the risk and the courage to document the process for you. But beware! Precautions must be taken...

If you're not interested in the techincal details but rather just want the working program, You can just get it HERE

A friend of mine has recently asked if it's possible to write a console .net application to make a thumbnail of a website. The task is pretty trivial with Windows forms actually. But him being the Linux guy and all... I decided to pick up the challenge

An interesting use case. In winForms all you really need to do is drop a WebBrowser on your form and once it's loaded the p...

If Stardock gave WindowBlinds version names like Microsoft did with XP and its successor, WindowBlinds 5 would probably be called "WindowBlinds Translucent" or "WindowBlinds See-Through" or... oh no... it can't be... or can it (?) "WindowBlinds Vista"!

In the first part I've explained the most noticeable changes you will see in a new WindowBlinds 5 skin but to be honest it went all crazy about translucent parts. We've got used to the translucent start panel since 4.6 which I've describe...

One of the coolest features of WindowBlinds 5 is the possibility to define a translucent frames in your skin. This means a lot of things and a lot of new possibilities. Your windows can drop shadows, glow but most of all you don't have to look at those jaggies if your skin features rounded corners in them. The level of excitement can probably be shown by the fact that it does not have even shown in the public beta, yet it already has artists creating artwork advocating it. and a number...

I find a lot of users having problems with how fonts are defined in a WindowBlinds skin. It's quite simple once you understand it how it's done.WindowBlinds bases on the premise that most of the skins use just a small number of font variants but use them in a number of places, meaning that one font setting will be used in a number of places like a push button, a tab, a status bar. A font setting in SkinStudio is called "font preset" and is a set of font name, size and formatting as wel...

It all started with another brain-freeze today. I just couldn't find a section that contained the File Dialog places bar images. You know the bar on the left on the File->Save and File->Open dialogs? I bet you've been cursing more than once searching for a section like that. SkinStudio will help you with searching for a section if you know it's UIS name or its part AND if such section actually exist. But in my case it didn't.

Wouldn't it be great if I could just lookup the section by it...

Little I knew that I will be involved in it, when I was posting a while ago on Neowin and WinMatrix about the cool Warcraft skins available on Wincustomize. Blizzard is offering a World of Warcraft suite now for download on their  US and European pages pages and upon their request we needed to swiftly modify the Apocalypse's great World_of_Warcraft skin to meet Blizzard's request to match the game GUI more closely. I was assigned to the task so I went swiftly to the loca...

I've seen some requests recently to make Blog Navigator run from a flash dongle or any mobile drives in our newsgroups lately. I was not quite comfortable with the inability to change the storage path by the user myself for a while, not to say that the data is stored in a wrong place, on the contrary, this default behavior does not change. But to make it confined to a Local Application Data folder was a bit too harsh. for my taste.

So, for Blog Navigator 1.2, I went ahead and made it totally ...

What we really intend to make for you with Blog Navigator is to create a robust and efficient way to manage all your on-line knowledge. You know how hard it is to actually find something useful on the Internet at times, right? That's where our "Web Search Folders" come to help. You could already organize your knowledge into baskets, but we've decided that it's not enough. While baskets were a great way of organizing your findings and keeping them for later reference, there were a couple of defic...

[Updated 11 May 2005] Read at the end of the article.

I've been on a quest to improve a skin today and to do so I needed to extract a big archive in a proprietary and not widely supported format and get the images out of it and into the skin. Turned out the first part was not as bad as I expected as I've found some tools on the net to do this and Kris helped with the tool to convert the images in the proprietary format into TGA's. Now here's where the pain begun.

I needed to have my a...

Browsing the WindowBlinds skins on Wincustomize and applying them is a source of a lot of joy, but there's also a drop of frustration. There are some common problems with the skins that skinners notoriously forget to check for. Perhaps my working environment is not typical but since you've went all the way to create a skin it's relatively easy to make it a perfect skin for everyone. So here are the 10 things I find most common to be wrong with a lot of skins:

Vertical taskbars. this one is a ...

So Saturday was my birthday. I'd rather not think about which one (it was round). And today I've gotten a little late email from my sister with 2 photo's of a neat hardware she's found on the Internet ... (I think she actually got them through email)

I was tempted to post it in "Gadgets & Electronics" category, but finally decided against... I think they actually pre-date their era and may be too revolutionary for our times. We all know what happens to products like that developed by...

I really find the "Did you know that..." dialogs showing when an application is running quite hilarious.

They provide no solution or enrichment whatsoever, because some random tip at the program startup is highly unlikely to help me with the task I am about to perform with the software. It also is completely stripped off wider context and random as it is, serves exclusively as an annoyance and the first thing user has to turn off in the application.

That said, user still may find some tip...

Stardock IconDeveloper is a free icon creation tool available from Stardock Net,Inc. You can download it from here. Stardock also offers an advanced version allowing you to create icons of any sizeand other really cool things like recoloring icons or even whole icons packs as well as skinning them. But as long as you do not need the advanced features available in the Professional version, you're more than welcome to use the free edition of IconDeveloper.There was a real storm of posts on the Ico...

Last week it has been brought to my attention that Blog Navigator can no longer post web articles. Alas, this was only a symptom of a much worse disease, but first things first...

This month in a noble effort of making the Windows platform more secure for us and our (perhaps future) kids Microsoft rolled out a new set of updates, among which is this one innocently called MS05-013 and located in Microsoft Knowledge Base under a mysterious KB891781.

You will find more about the update and ...