I recently grew tired of the appearance of Luna and Royale. The nice thing with pre-XP Windows was the colour scheme was easily modifiable (which is incidentally another nice thing that pre-OS X had that OS X doesn’t) so if I got bored with a colour combination I could change things. With XP I had 4 options. I got myself Window Blinds and downloaded the very nice SkinPlant 2005 theme. It’s attractive without having useless eye candy. The sad thing was some of my other programs just didn’t mesh with it at all. The colours for both MSN and WMP simply don’t match the rest of the OS at all, and remind me of running iTunes. I looked at the SkinPlant theme for WMP and it had it matching again, but as soon as I wanted to watch a video it reverted to the old skin. No good. I downloaded WinAmp and had a similar result. The Winamp Modern default skin has a nice feature of letting me dock it to the top of the screen. None of the skins I tried supported this. Now I’m not sure whether it’s the fault of the programmers or the skinners, but this…
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According to Evan’s Weblog, the 1 millionth Tablet PC was sold in February. That’s not a large number compared to the whole computer market, but it is a significant milestone consideringit was thought it would go the way of previous pen computers. Sales in 2003 were over 400 thousand, so Tablet PC sales would appear to be increasing by 100 thousand each year.

Microsoft has comissioned six brand-new typefaces which they plan to use in Longhorn and future software products. The fonts were specifically designed for reading on-screen using ClearType.

The new ClearType Font Collection incorporates improved ClearType and OpenType technologies, and a boatload of research, to improve the structure and the clarity of the letter forms. Basically, that means a story will be easier to read because the letters and words won’t be as soft and mushy looking.

The Microsoft collection includes two serif, three sans serif, and a monospaced face for use in programming environments. They are intended to be text typefaces as opposed to display faces that are used in larger sizes for headlines. Some of the new fonts are suitable for print as well as on-screen applications.

Mac users will be left out in the cold, however, as Apple has declined to license them for use in their software products, including Mac OS X.

To see the fonts, click the link below.

According to The Register, Intel have confirmed plans to release a 64bit version of their low-end x86 CPU.

This may come as a blow to AMD, as their low-end x86 CPU, the Sempron, is crippled to be a 32bit-only slice of silicon. Whether or not this will make a real difference remains to be seen - the Sempron 3100+ has shown itself to be a right little screamer of a chip for being a budget part, and the addition of 64bit extensions does not seem to have had a huge impact on the performance of the P4.
Even still, perhaps AMD will take a look at their Sempron line and have a think.

..hot on the heels of RC1 comes Release Candidate 2. Supposedly this will be the final version before going “gold” - which will probably happen sometime next month (the previously reported April 29 date is when the software will be available from retailers)

I am unsure what’s new in this version just yet (still downloading...), but apparently this will be the WHQL version, so any drivers written for RC2 will work on the final RTM version. Of course, I’m still hoping that somebody out there will port a good XBox controller driver to Windows x64 so I can finally transition across for good.

Get it here