Many skinners have requested this for years. The Fourth major change in WindowBlinds 4.5 which may get into 4.5 or have to wait until a minor update is the ability to have per-pixel alpha on menus. We don't have any skins done yet that show this off (we're working on them now). Those of you who like very nice Start menus can imagine the cool stuff that can be done with this. The Third new major feature of WindowBlinds 4.5 is the ability to have per-pixel alpha channels on the Start menu itself. We may expand this further so that in a given skin, skin authors can define specific frames for specific programs within a single skin if they choose. But you can probably imagine what skin authors will be able to do with this. We don't have any examples done yet so we'll have to wait to show some screenshots. The Second new feature of WindowBlinds 4.5 is the ability for WindowBlinds visual styles to now include special styles just for the frames of Internet Explorer / Explorer browser windows. So in other words, if you want Windows XP to look like Windows XP consistently you will want WindowBlinds. Plus you have the fact that there's thousands of WindowBlinds skins out there:Īnd once last look at this dialog using the default Windows XP msstyle: Not that we'd recommend this color combination but rather just as a demonstration of the difference between hue-shifting (a WindowBlinds 4.5 feature) and what you can imagine applying some arbitrary color to the entire thing. You could not colorize this with the old system because it would look very muddied with a single color grafted onto everything. How about some skin that has lots of colors? All looking as if the skin was always meant to have that.īut let's go with something harder. Or how about if you wanted to have it be a more vibrant blue? Even if you would never want a purple skin on your desktop, it now looks like it designed with purple in mind. Notice how natural it looks? It doesn't looked washed out. So a skin like VectorCell might look like this normally and we'll load up the Setup dialog of that Ventrilo program so you can see the dialog of a pretty busy looking window:īut with Hue and saturation shifting it could then be made to look like this: This has the effect making skins look a lot more normal and interesting. You shift the colors of the skins rather than apply a color mask to them. Why? Because if you take a blue and yellow skin (For instance) and apply red to the whole thing, the entire thing looks.well washed out. This worked on some skins quite well but on many skins not so well. Before, you could apply a color to an entire skin. WindowBlinds had colorizing before but not like this. Users could have their cake and eat it too.Īnd soon WindowBlinds 4.5 will be here. And its use of hardware acceleration and other features exclusive to Windows XP make WindowBlinds not just faster than the default Windows XP style (so fast that the high performance PC company, Alienware chose to bundle WindowBlinds with their computers) but on part with the original classic Windows interface. culminating with WindowBlinds 4.4 released in 2004. So then Stardock came out with WindowBlinds 4.x. But skinning more elements of the GUI also came at a performance cost that some noticed. WindowBlinds could skin even non-theme aware programs (i.e. For only theme-aware applications can be skinned by Microsoft's msstyles run through Windows XP.īut there was Stardock, who had been skinning the GUI of operating systems for many years. Then Windows XP came and it came with a skin (known as "visual styles" when you're "skinning" the entire GUI).Īnd so the title bars and borders were changed. In the beginning there was Windows classic. Using the popular voice over IP chat program, Ventrilo, let's take that journey with WindowBlinds 4.5.
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