11/13/2023 0 Comments Beos theme for windowblinds![]() Stardock began contracting professionals to make skins to ensure that there were some good, new, benchmark skins available. This made WindowBlinds a lot more popular for people who liked Aero but wanted a bit nicer look and feel to it.Ī new, simpler and just as powerful config window. WindowBlinds 7 introduced a new type of skinning format called UIS0 which allowed users to just modify the existing Aero skin. It is with some irony that WindowBlinds 7 was ready in time for Windows 7 (the versions being the same was coincidence). The official World of Warcraft skin got a second life with WindowBlinds 6 The new config allowed users to do all kinds of crazy things to their skins and then save them as a sub-style That dragon is fully animated and so is the title bar. The new config allowed end users to heavily modify their skin library. However, the biggest change came in the new configuration because it was becoming clear that the number of high quality new skins was dwindling (while the user base continued to increase). WindowBlinds 6 added the ability to apply effects such as Gaussian blurs to skins in real-time. Thus, a lot of the most talented skinners began finding other things to spend their time on. However, the problem Stardock and its community faced was that a “complete” skin was a significant amount of labor. WindowBlinds 5 was designed to support per-pixel alpha blending, toolbar button changing, progress animation improvements, animated per-pixel Start menus, title bars, etc. Microsoft was finally taking the aesthetics of Windows seriously and created a new glassy looking UI called Aero. WindowBlinds 4 added a lot of neat controls for controlling how coloring worked. WindowBlinds skins acquired the reputation for being ugly, gaudy, fat. However, this popularity would come at a price – the quality of the average skin submitted became substantially lower. noticeably faster) than using Windows XP without it. Version 4 was the point where WindowBlinds “won” the contest versus uxtheme.dll in that it could not only do everything it could do and more but version 4 made use of DirectX draw acceleration to make WindowBlinds substantially faster (i.e. ![]() Other times it was about reminding power users just how gimped the Windows XP “Luna” UI made Windows. ![]() Sometiems it was just a matter of making Windows XP look a bit nicer than Windows XP defaulted to. (The Microsoft XBox team here – one wonders what the Windows team felt about this at the time) Third-parties began licensing WindowBlinds for marketing purposes (Nvidia here) The quality of the skins had to really go up to compete with the bland but free uxtheme skins. ![]() WindowBlinds thus had to provide significant value-add to justify $20. The competition had stiffened as Microsoft had released uxtheme.dll that, once hacked, allowed people to create GUI skins freely. In fact, making Windows look like other, less ugly, OSes was a big deal.ĭesigned with Windows XP in mind, 3.0 was the first version that could skin every part of the Windows GUI. MacOS’s “Aqua” look for its newly launched MacOS X helped make WindowBlinds incredibly popular for Windows users who suddenly recognized how ugly Windows NT/2000 were. Remember AOL? Their client was a huge pain the skin correctly. WindowBlinds skins supported adding buttons and other objects into the frames (such as this stock ticker). We took this out because users were unhappy about their “privacy” (anonymous data being sent). ![]() WindowBlinds used to send data back to us on what skins people had. Yea, this was the config UI we had.cough.Īdds per-window skinning, semi-transparent explorer windows, skin colorizing Let’s take a look at its evolution in pictures. It was the first program to enable users to customize the look and feel of the Windows GUI. WindowBlinds 1.0 was released in November 1998! Since then, it’s gotten over 100 MILLION downloads! Over on CNET’s version 8 has received over 18 million downloads. ![]()
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