WindowBilnds is a program designed to make Windows into a fully skinnable operating system. It does this by applying visual styles (skins) to Windows. On Windows XP, it extends Microsoft's visual style engine to support WB visual styles which are faster and use less memory and are far more flexible. With version 3.3, much of the Windows XP visual style engine has been brought to Windows 98, ME, and 2000. New under the hood changes include a global bitmap cache which dramatically improves performance while reducing memory consumption. Stardock also worked closely with ATI and Nvidia to take advantage of some of the new hardware accelerated APIs (the results can be seen in the latest drivers from both). Creating skins with WindowBlinds can be as easy as loading up notepad and a paint program. Users can also download SkinStudio (www.skinstudio.net) which provides a graphical environment for creating skins.

Useful links:
Full skinning guide:
http://www.windowblinds.net/skinning

Getting Started:
https://www.stardock.com/products/windowblinds/wb3/wb3_guide_final.htm

Download:
http://www.windowblinds.net/default.asp?page=download

Screenshot:
http://www.windowblinds.net/wb-may02.jpg

Want your desktop to look like that screenshot? Grab https://www.wincustomize.com/skins.asp?cmd=456&SkinID=67&library=22 (the full suite).

I hang out in lots of different places that have very different feels and attract different kinds of people.

Some places I hang out have people who have reached the consensus that "Warezing" is normal and fine whereas other places (like here) it's considered stealing plain and simple.

What creates such communities? I know the people who run sites that have people who seem to have no morals and they themselves are very moral, ethical people yet their sites are full of petty criminals.

What creates a net society of upstanding people? What creats a net society of people who are generally the same age despite having never met or usually devulged their ages?

With WindowBlinds 3.3, Stardock hopes to finally make WindowBlinds so rock solid, so fast, and so memory efficient that the only question in using it or not will come down to whether one wants to be able to have their own Windows GUI.

Version 3.3 has a global skin cache, for instance, rather than every skin having a copy of a skin in memory, it call comes from a central cache which saves memory and resources. This is particularly useful for users of Windows 98 and ME where resource usage is a real concern.

It has optimized painting for its UIS visual style format to the point where WindowBlinds is actually a GUI accelerator.

Stardock has also worked closely with ATI and Nvidia to get greater support for the extended XP windowing APIs which WindowBlinds uses to enhance its performance.

Two months of hard core compatibility testing has gone into 3.3 to ensure that WindowBlinds skins more windows completely and safely than any other skinning solution available anywhere.

Stardock will continue to improve on all of the above along with adding more features and other improvements in future versions, but 3.3 is a true milestone in bringing Windows skinning to users.

Anyone out there willing to do some benchmarking of WindowBlinds 3.3 vs. Windows XP's msstyles?

On the net, you'll still see people say "WindowBlinds is slow, I use msstyles instead..."

Well, our benchmarking is showing WindowBlinds 3.3 as literally twice as fast as visual styles. But what would be nice is for someone to do some independent benchmarking.

If we can consistently show WindowBlinds to be faster than msstyles, that will mean that users are actually better off using WindowBlinds to have the Windows XP look than using Windows alone from a performance/resource point of view which would be a major win.

The only non-Stardock benchmarking program I'm aware of is skinbench. Anyone have any other programs they think would be useful for benchmarking GUI performance?

Alberto Riccio has released a new version of CursorXP.

CursorXP is a program that allows Windows XP and Windows 2000 users to supercharge their mouse cursors. It's really gotta be seen to be believed. The freeware version supports cursors of any size, all sorts of special effects, and more.

New in version 1.1:

- Fixed compatibility bugs with games and full screen apps.
- Fixed jumping tooltips bug.
- Fixed CXP cursors dissapearing on dragging icons.
- Several GUI improvements.
- New scriptable animations!
- CursorXP compatible with the 'Hide pointer while typing' Windows
option.
- Support for 20 different languages!

The net seems to get more and more full of what I call chuds (cannibalistic, humanoid, underground dwellers). These people tend to be highschoolers or college students that have received so many wedgies that they take out their frustrations on the rest of us.

I see them when I play games, and I really see them when you see a news item on some of these tech sites. That's where htey really come out. Doesn't matter what the news item is, they'll just come on and rip on it.

A chud usually has no actual skills themselves. They just like to put things down.

They're the d00d from IRC that tells people who crappy some program is because they tried it for 5 seconds 3 years ago. They're the weenie on a given site that tells people that htey should use some unrelated piece of software instead.

They're the "l33t" gamer who uses some simplistic rush strategy in an online game and calls everyone a "noob" who objects to having a game that took 20 minutes just to set up be settled in 3 minutes.

I'm pretty thankful that there are very few chuds that hang out here. But oye, they really annoy me.

I used to feel sorry for geeks in highschool. But now, I think more of them need more wedgies, it's the last night in real life that their obnoxious behavior will have physhical consequences.

The USS Clueless is one of the best blogs on the net. No matter what your political affiliation may be, it's a great place to learn all sorts of interesting things. Check it out.

DesktopX lets you build desktops. And best of all, it lets users extend Explorer or whatever shell they're using to support true objects using industry standard scripting languages such as VBScript, Javascript, etc.

If you don't have DesktopX 1.1, give it a try now, it represents the largest combined development effort in Stardock's history.

I tell ya, if you haven't had kids yet, appreciate your good health.

I'd always been one of those unusually healthy people. Perfect school attendance, never sick. Got married, still never got sick.

We had our first kid and for 4 years, no illness at all. But this year, our son started pre-school and BAM. Nasty stomach flu went through every person in the family. Lasted a week per person (4 people in the household) and on me rather than being REALLY sick for a week I was just somewhat sick for 2 weeks. All last week I pretty much just hang around the house laying down staring at the ceiling with a couple of hours to spend on the net (wireless laptop is a great entertainment device).

I think we're going to stop at 2 kids!

Well, it looks like banner ads may have to go. They don't pay hardly anything and the ad places realy are trying to get us to use pop-up ads instead.

Simply put, that's not acceptable. I don't know about you guys but I hate pop-up ads.

I've been pretty public in my support of how deviantART has supported itself - subscriptions in which the users get a bunch of goodies. I'd like to see us eventually do something like that. Provide a slick skin browing program, for instance, (https://www.stardock.com/temp/sb.jpg) as a goodie along with custom skins and other things we come up with. That way, users aren't "donating" to the site but actually getting good stuff with the knowledge they're helping the site.