Stardock has released WindowBlinds 3.5. The new version integrates Skincast, a new way of being able to install new visual styles directly from display properties.

The new version also supports the skinning of sliders and has numerous tweaks to increase compatibility.

WindowBlinds has recently been used by such companies as Nintendo, nVidia, and Microsoft to provide visual styles based on their products.

To download, go to www.windowblinds.net

Since we moved to the subscription system we've been able to directly see how much bandwidth is used by subscribers/customers versus non-customers/non-subscribers.

Specifically:
Anyone who has purchased Object Desktop or any Stardock product or a WinCustomize subscription or is an apprentice or higher goes to a different high speed server than those who have not.

The problem is, the people who have not bought anything at all are now consuming about 9 megabits per second.

That's 6 T1's being used by people who are essentially non-contributing bandwidth consumers.

That's why the "Server is busy" message is coming up more and more often for these guys.

As you can imagine, 6 T1's of bandwidth is expensive. Especially when, not to use too fine a point, being used largely by free-loaders.

I'm not sure what the solution is. If we cap it, the site becomes unbearably slow and we don't want to punish people who are just trying out this stuff (i.e. legitimately seeing what this is all about versus people who just want to leech off the bandwidth).

Any suggestions?

A new version of ObjectDock is available. This is a new build (as of today, as opposed to a buggy version that got leaked over the weekend).

ObjectDock is a task manager / program launcher that does it with style. The new beta has these features:

+ Ability to have really really big magnification (almost 200 pixel sized icons)

+ Ability to move the dock left, right, top or bottom.

+ Skinnable backgrounds (defaults to metallic).

+ More font options

Download at www.objectdock.com

Incidentally, please feel free to post this news on other sites, We're a bit swamped right now and would appreciate spreading the word. Thanks.

Well there are now 2000 WindowBlinds skins on this site alone.

Obviously there have been a lot more created that were lost with Skinz.org's demise as well as elsewhere. Plus an equal number that never saw the light of day here because they were rips or essentially duplicates (i.e. "It's Luna but a slightly different shade of blue..").

A year ago today there were 1,416 skins here. It probably doesn't come as a shock that we monitor the # of skins being made in various formats. I thought I'd share some of this with y'all.

1,416 WB skins a year ago. And 63 msstyles.

Now, there's 2000 WindowBlinds skins and about 600 msstyles. (an increase of around 584 WindowBlinds skins and 537 msstyles) for a net total of over 1000 new visual styles created in the past year (though quite a bit of duplicates in that 1000, particularly on the msstyles side).

In late April of 2002 themexp had a crash and lost the 559 msstyles it had. It took until October 28 to get back to that number with most of those msstyles being ones that were previously on the site just re-submitted. There's definitey been a significant decreaes in activity on the msstyle side which is discouraging (for us, a skin author is a skin author is a skin author).

On WindowBlinds, we're concerned about seeing the same thing happen. One of the things we're hoping to get in by WindowBlinds 4 is the creation of a new meta skin format. Basically, a quasi-universal skin format that can then be exported by SkinStudio into multiple skin formats. So your skin could be turned instantly into a WindowBlinds skin, a trillian skin or even a Media Player skin (with obvious limitations), or an ObjectBar skin or whatever.

With a meta format, the "compiler" (SkinStudio in this case) could handle the parts you choose not to do and fill them in for you automatically. The best skins would still be the ones where the author created each and every part.

But by allowing users to create a decent looking visual style without having to do every last part, it will hopefully allow new skinners to get into the "scene" gradually.

The meta format could, for instance, create the explorer task panel for you by looking at your title bar, frames and title bar buttons. It wouldn't be as nice as someone who actually took the time to do it, but on the other hand it would still look pretty good.

Plus SkinStudio itself could be put into different modes for different user levels. The beginner could just worry about making the needed buttons, title bar and borders and let the meta format take care of the rest by generating the rest on the fly.

On top of that, we hope with WindowBlinds 4 to support a new technology that will allow for collaborative skins created by skin authors who don't even know each other. Thus dividing the work into parts for people who are interested in doing that.

So the goal with WindowBlinds 4 in 2003 will be to try to make skinning far more accessible to bring in new people while putting in features that let the pros really shine.

The first WindowBlinds skins began being submitted to the library at the beginning of 1999. My first few skins were ports (with permission) of Kaleidoscope skins on the Mac (www.kaleidoscope.net).

It took 2 years for WindowBlinds to get up to that first 1,000 skins. And about a year and a half to get to the second thousand.

That comes out to be about 1.5 skins per day with the amount being somewhat higher in 2002 than in 2001 which goes to show that skinning is becoming much more mainstream.

For all those skinners out there who have spent their precious spare time creating skins/visual styles and shared them with the world, thank you. I've downloaded most of those 2000 skins and enjoyed pretty much all of them.

Coming probably Monday.

+ Ability to have the dock on any edge.
+ Skinnable backgrounds and seperatators.

A new version of ObjectDock is now available. ObjectDock is a program that provides a taskbar and launchbar and does it with style by allowing for very interesting visual effects for mouse overs. It's inspired by the MacOS X dock.

New in this version is a new magnification option for mouse overs (not on by default, go to settings to change it) along with significantly faster performance, slightly less memory usage and several new display options.

The website is www.objectdock.com.

ObjectDock is freeware. Please feel free to post this news elsewhere.

Back in July I was on TechTV's Screen Saver's demoing Object Desktop.

Here's a link to a video of that demo for those of you interested in seeing what Object Desktop can do when used as an integrated package:

http://storage.stardock.com/files/ODNT2002_TechTV.mpeg

Special thanks to TechTV.

Suggestion: You may want to save this file locally and play it there rather than trying to play it in the browser.

Stardock Entertainment develops games and beta 3 of Galactic Civilizations (which I'm the lead developer on) is now available for the beta team.

Stardock has had ObjectDock floating around internally for a long while. But with the recent releases of a host of "dock" programs we figured it was time to go ahead and let people give it a try.

ObjectDock is a task manager / program launcher that does it with style. It was created to test out new Object Desktop technologies for seeing what could and couldn't be done reasonably on Windows 2000/XP. It's inspired by the dock on MacOS X (which is one of the reasons why we've never made it available previously and why it's freeware).

Feel free to post news on this elsewhere. This isn't a "product", it's more of a technology demo that we've made freely available. Make sure you read the page carefully.