After a year of rewriting SkinStudio from scratch, Stardock has released SkinStudio 6.

SkinStudio is a free program designed to make it easy for people to create WindowBlinds skins.  Version 6 has been completely rewritten to provide a much simpler user experience for creating skins.

Making your own skins

SkinStudio makes it a snap to design your own skins for WindowBlinds.  When a user desires to create a new skin, they start out with either Luna (if it's on Windows XP) or Aero (if it's on Windows Vista). From there, they can change as much or as little as they want of a given skin.

As users go through the different parts of the Windows GUI, they can replace different elements with new images. The WindowBlinds skinning engine is extremely flexible allowing for the repositioning of buttons, independent border sizing, animation, and much more.

A Completed Skin

A complete looking skin will have all new title bars, borders, buttons, Start menu, taskbar, etc.  It can provide a dramatically different look and feel to your PC.  You can share your creations with others on many different websites including WinCustomize.com, deviantART, Customize.org, Skinbase.org and many others.

A completed skin

SkinStudio Pro

Stardock also offers SkinStudio Pro for skinners who are really into skinning or looking to make skins professionally. SkinStudio Pro lets skinners look at the actual underlying code of a given section and includes a live animation editor for Start menu animations (WindowBlinds 6 includes 30fps start menu animations as seen in Dragon). SkinStudio Pro is $19.95.

SkinStudio Pro adds features for pro skinners like animation editing, code review, etc.

Download: www.skinstudio.net