Another week has passed in the skinning world and it seems like, over time, it gets harder and harder to cover it all. 5 years ago, we used to refer to "the community" and that meant talking about a few dozen people who all hung out on a couple of websites. Now, "the community" is made up of millions of people in various degrees that spans multiple sites. But, I shall bravely try to go through and cover what I thought was interesting and hence offend those I leave off. But I assure you, leaving something out is only a result of my sheer incompetence rather than malice.
So last week Stardock released the first beta of StyleVista. It lets Windows Vista beta testers change the opacity of windows and add color to them. By default, Windows Vista's GUI is clear glass which means it's colorless and semi-transparent. I suspect something like this will be "built in" to Windows Vista by the time it ships. The Stardock Lab is disecting Vista to see what can and can't be done with it and this was one of the first things that came out of it.
Also last week, WindowBlinds 4.6 came out. That's the version that supports glow effects around buttons. It is a cool effect and represents a great final stage for the WindowBlinds 4.x line which is now nearly 3 years old shockingly enough (WindowBlinds 4 came out in March of 2003). WindowBlinds 5 beta should start showing up sometime in September or October. The most obvious new feature in WindowBlinds 5 is that it can do Aero-glass effects on Windows XP. Personally, I don't think that's the impressive part. Whoopie, Stardock has semi-transparent borders and title bars. The impressive part is the performance. It was fast enough to impress Microsoft's people when I was there at Redmond. I was against having this feature put in because I was convinced that such a thing couldn't be done without it being a pig. But on my ThinkPad T42 laptop, it was fast enough that if there's a performance hit, I couldn't tell. But it is certainly going to require a modern video card. And obviously, anyone who still thinks WindowBlinds is slow might as well wait until they save up enough allowance money to buy a Pentium class machine. 
WindowBlinds 5's other big feature is something called "Deep Skinning" which we'll talk about more when we get closer. And of course, being able to neat things on Windows Vista is a big goal. The StyleVista project is part of our effort to find out what can and can't be done with the Windows Vista compositer. For those of you in a cave, Windows Vista is the name of Microsoft's next version of Windows (previously referred to as "Longhorn").
Speaking of Windows Vista, there's a lot to debate about in the coming months about what WinCustomize should and shouldn't support. On XP, we took the position that .msstyles were out of bounds because every .msstyles file is a Windows XP system file modified (every msstyle file out there is a patched version of luna.msstyles, a copyrighted file). That's why there's no msstyles here on WinCustomize. On logons and boot screens, Stardock developed freeware that let people apply their own files to what's on other people's systems -- thus avoiding what other websites have done (pass around logonui.exe's and Windows kernel files). That's something that we've had to suffer through since they are in significant demand and msstyles that are imported into WindowBlinds (via SkinStudio) run faster than they do when people patch their system files to get them to run. But let's remember, at the end of the day, WinCustomize is still a "business". And so not having msstyles on put WinCustomize at a severe disadvantage.
So what about Windows Vista? Windows Vista has a new .msstyles format. It's not the same as what's in Windows XP which means those .msstyles that are floating around won't work (unless you have WindowBlinds and SkinStudio -- ironically). The new .msstyles format isn't easily skinnable though. In XP, the format was fully documented and in the clear. It's not on Longhorn. So it's not definite whether people will be able to make new .msstyles. And by new, I mean not just replacing the graphical resources in it (that can be done but they results would be a zillion different Aero-glass like things). But regardless of how much or how little .msstyles in Windows Vista can be modified, shoudl we support them here at WinCustomize?
Stardock has to deal with that question as well. It's not commonly know but the first company to create third-party msstyles was Stardock. In May 2001, Stardock figured out how to let people run third-party msstyles. The feature was going to be incorporated into "WindowBlinds XP". It didn't require patching uxtheme.dll to make it work either (not in memory or on disk). But Microsoft asked Stardock not to do so as they were concerned about branding and support issues if people were making their own msstyles. "MSStyles is not designed for third party use." Stardock was told and so the feature was removed. Half a year later, uxtheme patching came out and some companies have even released $20 programs that do little more than patch uxtheme.dll and Stardock had to go through a msstyles vs. WindowBlinds debate for the past 4 years even though it could have had both msstyles and WindowBlinds together in a single package from day one.
This time around, Stardock is intent on making sure that sort of thing doesn't happen again. StyleVista or some other free program may be developed that lets users apply .msstyles (or some other format that doesn't suffer from the copyright issues that .msstyles do). But whatever it's called, a free mechanism of some kind is likely to be developed to let people do what is possible to do with the built in engine. WindowBlinds is $20 because it provides its own skinning engine that has vastly more features. The idea that some users have paid $20 to patch a byte of memory in uxtheme.dll to use the built in engine is appalling.
Meanwhile, the Dangeruss project continues. MikeB has been going through Dangeruss's skins (with permission) and updating them to WindowBlinds 4.6 level. The results have been fantastic. Personally, I'm waiting for Driftwood, possibly my all-time favorite skin. It's 5 years old now but if you check it out, you can see the real creativity there (insert random potshot at msstyles here). This is why millions of people run WindowBlinds.
One thing that has been eating up a lot of time is PowerUser.TV. We teamed up with the Neowin guys to make this. I'd love to see more WinCustomize participation on that. There's an IRC channel #poweruser.tv on irc.stardock.com. Your WC UserID and PW will work on the website. We plan to highlight some skinning stuff in the next week or so. If you want to support us, the best thing you can do is to: A) Subscribe to PowerUser.TV on iTunes. Just click HERE to do that. And vote for us on PodCastAlley by clicking HERE. Also, if we want to get more WinCustomize coverage on it, we need more WinCustomize user participation in the comments area and its forums.
Speaking of participation, we are going to be doing a major WinCustomize community overhaul soon. That is, Stardock is going to be turning more of the site's duties over to the community. We'll be needing over a dozen volunteer moderators in the coming weeks. People who are active on WinCustomize.com's forums and comments areas and who know how to write. WinCustomize gets over 3 million unique visitors monthly, it's a great place to build up a resume on. And we need your help. Speaking of commenting, we will soon be displaying the top commentators on WinCustomize. People who post on the news items, comment on skins, and comment on the forums. Top users will be eligible for various prizes. There will also be bonus points to those who make insightful comments and such (apprentices on up will be able to reward users with bonus points). If you've ever read any Harry Potter books, one might look at it as the House Cup where people get points for their activities.
And to continue this rambling affair, another cool thing released last week was Gef's DesktopX theme - Office Extreem. It's a really fantastic work-oriented desktop environment. Speaking of DesktopX, the DesktopGadgets.com site is nearly ready to go up. Still doing beta testing on it now. The site's developed, it just has to be tested as it's like creating a whole, Amazon.com like store. Our hope is that people will come to realize just how powerful DesktopX is. I'm biased but other widget software is much less featured in what they can do in terms of real application development. Heck, DesktopX supports embedded ActiveX controls. Nobody else can do that kind of thing even close. There's a cool Windows Vista browser gadget that makes use of an IE ActiveX control that demonstrates the kinds of things you can do. There's a whole world beyond weather widgets and RSS readers and clocks.
Boxxi made a cool DesktopX widget for WinCustomize.com called LCDeep. It displays the newest skins available on WinCustomize. Another skinner who is on a roll is Solid Nuts. He has been putting out some great stuff.
Anyway, this is long enough. To keep up with what's happening on WinCustomize.com, make sure you are subscribed to the news letter which you can do from your WinCustomize.com account.
Cheers! 
Galactic Civilizations II: Dread Lords beta 3 is nearly ready to go out to beta testers. We are tentatively planning on releasing it a week from this Tuesday (Aug 30). Shortly after that time, users who have pre-ordered GalCiv II but have not previously had access to betas will be enabled to download the beta. But after September 1, new pre-orders will return to having to wait until beta 4 (late October).
