skins

A few months ago, I shared a great-looking combo of themes that give Windows XP and Firefox a dark, unified look. WindowBlinds is an app that achieves the same end, but brings a large gallery of theme options to you. Dress your desktop up or down with default selections or choose specially-formatted third-party themes that download straight into WindowBlinds. Either way, the sharp visuals and full-featured, easy-to-use configuration manager make this application a recommended choice for anyone interested in pimping out their desktop. Aww, yeah.

SAN FRANCISCO--A man wearing costumes covered head to toe in LEDs. Another man wearing a suit made of bubble wrap. A woman in a skirt made of Snickers wrappers. And a woman in a dress that generates power when she moves.

This was opening night of the 2nd Skin exhibit, a celebration of "imaginative designs in digital and analog clothing," at the Exploratorium here. And if the best and brightest in clothing embedded with technology and pure cacophony weren't on hand tonight, I can't even imagine where else they might be.

I didn't know quite … Read more

Mother's Day is only a couple of weeks away, and that can mean only one thing: The floodgates are about to unleash a torrent of digital photo frames.

While we've never understood the attraction of this wildly overproduced product category--especially those that are larger than life--we've long acknowledged the usefulness of Ceiva's networked variety to keep in touch with long-distance loved ones. And this year it's offering versions with customizable frame designs, at least for those offspring consumers who don't wait till the last minute.

It does seem a bit of a ripoff (… Read more

Where safety features are concerned, usually bicycles adopt ideas from cars. But SweetskinZ wants to do it the other way around.

The company got some ink last year with reflective bike tires that looked more like art projects than safety measures. Now it's applying this patented "SkinZ" technology to car tires, especially for ATVs in no-man's land.

Not only will these wheels increase visibility, but they'll definitely make a fashion statement as well. After all, how many tires have you seen on the road that look like snakeskin? Outside California, anyway.

Gadget skins normally aren't worth noting because they've become so common, but Crave has had a soft spot for GelaSkins almost since we first opened for business. Their designs have been consistently stylish and innovative as they've expanded to practically every surface imaginable, including laptops, iPhones, and even Wiimotes.

And now they've done it again, by going back to the root of their gadgets, quite literally. The "Motherboard" collection takes a bare-bones approach (or raw circuitry, in this case) with a design that will surely draw more than a passing glance at the local … Read more

AUSTIN, Texas--For some time I've been hearing about the documentary, Second Skin, which looks at players of massively multiplayer online games like World of Warcraft.

This evening I saw the film's world premiere in a screening at the South by Southwest film festival, and I came away from the showing feeling like I'd just seen a very bleak portrayal of a limited spectrum of the people that play such games.

I'm quite aware that my opinion was by far in the minority at the screening. The film's conclusion was greeted with raucous applause from a … Read more

These days just about any piece of health advice seems to involve hydration. Dermatologists in particular have a field day with this, pretty much telling patients to stay permanently lathered in creams, oils, and ointments to lock moisture in the skin. But unless your epidermis is perennially greased, how do you know if your skin cells are flush or parched?

U.K.-based iLift--which is already peddling a somewhat-dubious anti-cellulite device--says its handheld Hydro Test gauges hydration levels with a sensor head that's meant to be held against the skin and then render a numeric estimate on its … Read more

Thumb open an ordinary flip or slide phone and nothing happens, except maybe the triggering of a robotic greeting (Hello to you, too, Moto.) Do it again with a phone enriched with Emdigo's 3D offering and football players might rush by.

The carrier-partnered content distributor isn't one I'd normally cover, but the offering is an example of compelling 3D software coming our way. Similar third-party, carrier-agnostic downloads are sure to follow.

NFL Team Tailgate and Hello Kitty are two such examples of these enhanced animated skins that users can purchase through Verizon and Alltel. Flipping or sliding … Read more

While Power Downloader was sifting through criminal case files recently, he received an e-mail from Kitty Kilobyte who had gone back to school. After telling him of her latest "impossible" assignments and new "amazing" friends she had made, Kitty had an interesting software request. Kitty wanted some way to make her computer stand out from the rest of her classmates. She figured, if she's the niece of a famous software superhero, it should show--perhaps even if it's just in her computer's interface.… Read more