In many ways, The Magic Desktop represents a real triumph for the WindowBlinds / Object Desktop community. The Magic suite is the ultimate "I told you so" moment for long time skinners and users of skins who supported Stardock and WindowBlinds.
Let me explain what I mean by that:
Since 2001, users of WindowBlinds (and its big brother, Object Desktop) have taken a bit of a beating from people who advocated merely patching parts of Windows in order to run unsigned msstyles. Sure, msstyles were relatively crippled but they were "good enough" for many people and most importantly, they were free. By contrast, WindowBlinds and its parent suite, Object Desktop are most definitely not free. The argument, therefore, given by patcher advocates was that the WindowBlinds community were a bunch of suckers "paying for what should be free".
WindowBlinds advocates, argued back pointing out the reliability and performance advantages of WindowBlinds as well as the additional features. But those arguments mattered little to people who simply saw a thing that was free and another thing that wasn't.
But then a WindowBlinds advocate made a prediction on a website that I won't mention here: "If you're interested in having control over how your PC looks, you better hope that WindowBlinds succeeds. Because Microsoft has a long history of sticking their toe into a community and killing it off forever." This being a reference to Microsoft's previous endeavors like Active Desktop (which killed Pointcast), basic grammar controls in Word that wiped out stand-alone grammer checkers, disk compression, sound themes, and so forth.
The argument boiled down to this: What if "Longhorn" didn't have Msstyles like Windows XP does? And what if there were no WindowBlinds there to give users the option to change it?
The response at the time was that "Visual styles" were here to stay and if anything, Microsoft would expand the customization options on "Longhorn".
And so Longhorn arrived in the form of Windows Vista and sure enough, the MSStyles on Vista are nothing like they are on XP. If msstyles were limited on XP, they're absolutely crippled on Vista.
Thankfully, thanks to the WindowBlinds community's perseverance, Windows Vista users still can customize the look and feel of Windows Vista and Windows XP and do so with the same skins.
Let me show you some of the nice touches of The Magic Desktop that WindowBlinds users can take for granted but are a pipe dream for those still trying to patch the OS.
The Start Menu
[See Animation]
WindowBlinds 6 lets users have nicely animated start menus that use virtually no CPU (video card acceleration instead). When done right, like it is in Magic, the result is a clean, polished experience.
Explorer
Windows XP users are long used to being able to customize the look and feel of Explorer. The Magic Desktop does this very well on Windows XP. But for Windows Vista users, this is a new thing. The Magic Desktop is a pretty radical theme in the sense that it is designed partially to show off what is possible. It's not just "Look at me, it's Windows Vista with a few bitmap resources changed" but instead is a full-blown skin.
Internet Explorer 7
Changing the IE 7 controls in Vista via an msstyles is a pipe dream because on Vista, these controls are hard-coded. WindowBlinds actually has to do special work in order to skin the Windows Vista IE7 tabs and other controls.
Other interesting controls
The Windows Sidebar is also skinned via WindowBlinds 6.
And if I had Office 2007 installed on this machine, I could show how it even skins the new Office 200-style title bars natively.
Let's not forget IconPackager
What do you notice about the folders in the above screenshot? Look closely. They are still live folders. IconPackager (also part of Object Desktop) was updated to support a new icon package format that supports changing these live folder icons. Without such a change, icon changing on Windows Vista would have been largely pointless because what good are changing some icons but not changing folders? It would look very inconsistent.
The Magic Desktop suite not only supports this new feature, but all of its icons support 256x256 resolution.
How big is a 256x256 icon in its native size?
256x256 icon, native size.
In other words, The Magic Suite's icons are effectively clip art too. When you get to be that big, the detail and quality requirements become crucial to the experience.
Hooray for Object Desktop users!
Object Desktop users get a discount on The Magic Desktop suite (and we even had a special promotion for Object Desktop users who re-subscribed into 2009 to emphasize how important Object Desktop users are to Windows customization).
Someone might argue "Well, if Object Desktop, WindowBlinds, and IconPackager didn't exist, someone would have done it." Perhaps. But we're coming up on the first year anniversary of Windows Vista and Object Desktop and its programs IconPackager and WindowBlinds remain the only choice at any price for users who want to do this kind of thing.
People have taken changing things like their icons for granted since before Windows 3.0. Yet, here we are in 2007 and there's no way to change a live folder built into Windows and look right. Try it. Thanks to Object Desktop users, Windows customization has continued to thrive and in a Windows Vista world, where customization is more difficult, users still have a choice in what their Windows experience looks like.
Visit: Magic Desktop Homepage
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