The long awaited arrival of Spotify for the U.S. is over, as it is open to U.S. residents today.  The free accounts are still open for invites, but you can subscribe to premium or unlimited access and get in right now.  You can also get an instant invite via this link. Spotify invite via Klout So far I’m liking it, so get your invite and let us know how you like it!

Microsoft is expanding their network of retail stores in the coming years.  There’s only a handful of them now, but over the next 3 years they are going to expand to at least 75 new stores around the country. Via Neowin :

Here's a great article about Stardock from a local website. http://plymouth-mi.patch.com/articles/plymouth-based-software-game-development-company-looks-to-future In lieu of a front-desk receptionist is a young, bearded man in a purple t-shirt, cut-off shorts and flip-flops. This is Matt Bertsch, a technical adviser for the independent software company. On his desk sits a variety of emptied craft-beer bottles, statuettes, a variety of props and an opened deck of playing cards. Ber...

If you want to the newest social network Google+, then post or PM me your e-mail address (preferably gmail) and I will send an invite.  

Rainmeter has a new beta release out if you are interested in trying it out.  http://rainmeter.net/RainCMS/?q=Rainmeter21Beta Optimized some internal Rainmeter code to reduce processing time on startup and on refreshing. NowPlaying: Fixed Play/Pause issue with MusicBee. Improved performance when reading network statistics from Rainmeter.stats. Removed SkinAuthor method from PluginBridge. Plugin authors should read author from [Rainmeter] instead. WinCust...

Welcome back to another fun work week!  I hope you had an enjoyable weekend, and we will start things off with a look at some skins that have come in over the past few days!

Way back in 1981 I was lucky enough to watch the first Space Shuttle launch from the Kennedy Space Center.  I was just a kid then but what an awesome site it was!  It's funny to think back now how there were no cell phones, and all the other high-tech things we rely on today. This morning I took my family to nearly the exact same spot to view the final launch of both the Space Shuttle Atlantic and the Space Shuttle program.  The amount of people that came to the space coast to see it was incr...

Reminder that there is just less than a week less to enter in our CursorFX summer contest.  CursorFX is a fun and easy way to customize your desktop, and is one of the most popular galleries here on WinCustomize. You have until Monday, July 11th to get your cursor theme in, so don’t delay! For complete rules and information on the contest, please follow the link below. https://forums.wincustomize.com/409745

I hope everyone has a great holiday weekend who are in the U.S.  To kick off the weekend here is the latest edition of This Week in Skinning. This Week in Skinning-July 1st  

Happy July everyone!  It’s great to kick off a new month especially with our friends here on WinCustomize.  Just a reminder that we have the Summer CursorFX contest going on, and we are taking entries until July 11th so there’s plenty of time to get an entry in.  Now for this weeks picks!     Inception by theAVMAN A beautiful set of cursors to match the WB skin, but even looks great on its own.     ...

Winstep is an awesome desktop application, and there have been some really cool submissions that I wanted to highlight. Dark Tech   Frontier Xtreme   Dark and Dirty

I use Google Reader to browse through a variety of websites many of which are design related.  It’s a great way to get some inspiration and tips.  Some of these sites also have lots of free downloads like Photoshop brushes and patterns. Here are some of my favorites: Tripwire Magazine You the Designer Hongkiat Planet Photoshop Think Design Got any to share?

Lets jump right in!  Here are the latest skins on WinCustomize from the past few days.

Just as with ObamaCare we are still finding out "what's in the bill", and the latest for the failed Stimulus from Obama is..... A new  report  from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) finds that President Obama’s economic stimulus program helped nearly double U.S. debt. The 2011 Long-Term Budget Outlook, released Wednesday morning, reports that the “the combination of automatic budgetary responses” and Obama’s stimulus “had a profound impac...

There have been a ton of great games already released this year, but we are just at the halfway point of 2011 and there’s still much more to come it seems.  There’s a lot of PC games out there I want, but there are a few that are day-one purchases and ones I just can’t wait for.  Here’s my current list of my most wanted PC Games of 2011: Tropico 4 – If you follow my blog you will know I am a super huge Tropico fan.  Tropico 3 brought back th...