Normally, I ignore skinable applications, or at least the skins. My aversion probably stems from experiences with early versions of KDE and GNOME, where skins invariably broke even routine upgrades. That probably says more about skin designers than the idea of skins, but I scare easily. I don't even skin most of my skinnable Dashboard widgets. (Come to think of it, maybe it's the Konfabulator 1.x releases that left me skin-shy). J.Y., though, has convinced me to give skining another go-around with his latest set of free Jackets for iPulse, which was already the ultimate OS X eye candy. For those of you who aren't familiar, iPulse is a little, um, orb that sits in your Dock or on your desktop pulsing to the beat of your Mac's internals. That's cool enough in it's own right. But it's even cooler when the pulsing widget looks like Luke's Jedi training remote from Episode IV, or the New Years' ball that drops in Times Square. Or our Martian Overlords. Best of all, they don't seem to break any functionality.