What's Stardock's secret for being able to develop and publish its own games? The answer: Object Desktop, the world's most popular, award-winning desktop enhancement suite. And the flag-ship program of that suite is called WindowBlinds.

A new version of it went up today. Odds are, you already have a piece of WindowBlinds on your computer in some form or other. ATI uses it for skinning their Catalyst Control Center. nVidia includes a lite version with many of their cards. Blizzard used it to create the WoW Desktop. The Xbox 360 desktop uses it as well. And if you go to the hospital for an X-ray, if they're using a recent GE Medical X-ray machine, odds are it's using it as well.

WindowBlinds works by changing your Windows GUI system-wise -- title bars, borders, push buttons, Start bar, radio buttons, everything. Version 5 introduced the ability to make use of ATI and nVidia's DirectX acceleration so that in most cases, WindowBlinds is actually making Windows run faster even as it makes it look cooler.

Here are some screenshots:

It's home page is www.windowblinds.net. Have fun!