The new GalCiv website is up at https://www.galciv.com. It shares the same user database as WinCustomize so you can even logon and participate without having to create a new account.

Galactic Civilization is Stardock's upcoming space strategy game.

ObjectBar takes the best features from virtually every OS available and brings them to Windows. ObjectBar can do things such as group tasks together, configure the system tray to hide and show different items, display the programs you run most often automatically, tear off menus, menu tracking, virtual desktops, and full system integration. It does this with a fully skinnable and customizable interface. You can make Windows 98/ME's start bar look and function identically to the Windows XP Start bar or MacOS X's Finder. Dozens of ObjectBar themes are available on the Web that let users enjoy everything from a simplified Start bar to a Linux Gnome-style wharf.

When I've spoken to Tony over at TGTSoft in the past, he seems pretty reasonable. But the marketing of Style XP is just incredible misleading. A new interview of TGTSoft was justed posted at deviantART.

http://www.deviantart.com/news.php?id=6643

Here is my response to parts of it:


As Tony pointed out, we have no hostility towards each other, but the misleading statements are what really are the center of Stardock's concerns with TGTSoft.

Consider:
TGTSoft: "Since Style XP uses the native solution to skinning XP, we enjoy multiple benefits. The most important ones are no extra memory consumed, no extra CPU, and 100% application compatibility."

This is simply incorrect. As Microsoft has pointed publicly here at deviantART (Dan Shapiro himself, project manager of visual styles at Microsoft) that visual styiles are NOT compatible. Only the 3 visual styles included with XP were compatible enough (not 100% compatible, XP includes an immense exclusion list) to ship. Visual styles had so many compatibility problems that it led Microsoft to make them digitally signed. The fact is that Style XP breaks that digital signing protection and hence introduces the incompatibility that Microsoft spoke to. So to sy 100% compatibility is completely unfactual.

Secondly, visual styles use considerable memory. What does "no 'extra' memory" mean? It certainly uses more memory than using classic. And in fact, if you're using a visual style, the DLL uxtheme.dll gets attached to *every* process you run. Download a module viewer and see for yourself. Everytime you load up anything whether it be a game or notepad, if you're using a visual style, it has to load up uxtheme.dll every single time and attach that to the process. That's definitely using more memory. And by default, Style XP uses over 13 megs of memory on top of this (this can be turned off by it is on by default).

And finally, no extra CPU? I'm not sure what that means either. Since his statement was in response to why would someone use Style XP instead of WindowBlinds this would seem to imply that WindowBlinds uses extra CPU. It uses no more or less than visual styles do.


He goes on to say:
"Additional benefits include support for shellstyle.dll (skinning the left help window on Explorer)"

WindowBlinds 3.2 supports this as well without having to hack the shellstyle.dll.

"support for multiple font sizes, and support for multiple display resolutions (150dpi)."

So does WindowBlinds and this has nothing to do with Style XP. It would be like claiming that Style XP supports multiple monitors or something. XP is doing all the work.


And more:
TGTSoft: "Further, the new XP Theme APIs are supported completely. If you press the "Test" button in StyleBuilder you can see that all the parts draw correctly. This is not the case with some alternative solutions. "

Style XP doesn't support any APIs and in fact, all it effectively does is disable one of the APIs. Visual styles have nothing to do with Style XP. And again, since he's answering why use Style XP over WindowBlinds, it implies that WindowBlinds doesn't support these APIs which is most certainly does.


Now before someone reads what i've written and sees it as a "bash TGSoft" response, please bear in mind that I hold know ill will towards TGTSoft. My issue and Stardock's issue with TGTSoft is the misleading nature of their marketing.

Style XP does not do what they say and imply it does. All beta 7 does is use a mini-driver to patch out in memory the digital signing protection in Windows XP. This in turn allows you to download and use non-Microsoft signed visual styles on Windows XP. Put another way, it just makes it possible for other visual styles to show up in the appearance dialog. That's all. The latest betas come with a rather large sized visual style loader but it initself does nothing.

Hopefully some people can see why we, as developers who have worked over the past 3 years creating an actual skinning program, would object to someone who has created something that does the same thing as a 1K hex edit trying to make the two sound remotely equivalent.

Let me use an analogy, if someone wrote a patch that enabled scrollbar skinning in the shareware version of WindowBlinds, I think most people would agree that it would be inappropriate to claim that the patch is what is doing the scrollbar skinning. This is the same sort of thing here.

I don't run WinCustomize on a day to day basis, this site exists thanks largely to a team of generous *volunteers* who go through the dozens of submissions each day and check them out before getting to the user.

Wallpapers. This site isn't a wallpaper site. There are a gazillion sites out there with wallpapers. And we get dozens of wallpaper submissions each day. Maybe 1 out of 10 actually makes it up.

We have some guidelines we use:
https://www.wincustomize.com/guidelines.asp

It's not perfect and we're not perfect and if you've ever submitted a wallpaper here, oddsd are you have gotten an email saying it has been moderated. Sure, there are probably some really awful wallpapers that have gotten through, but generally speaking, we want the wallpaper section to be "the best of the best" and we tend to try to limit what we allow to get through and even then, only highly rated wallpapers (i.e. the best of the best of the best) will then show up under "Newest editions".

We hope that those of you who submit wallpapers understand that we have no particular bias against anyone, we just try to do the best we can. Each moderator has their own tastes and sometimes some of us are tougher than others to get through. We all have our own preferences (for instance, I for one love OS based wallpapers!) and those come into play when we're moderating.

I just wanted to clear the air on this because often times, some poor moderator will get an angry email from a disappointed artist. Remember, that moderator is just enforcing a site rule on only allowing extremely high quality wallpapers in which is of course a tough thing to judge often times.

A few tips:
1) Famous people wallpaper is almost assuredly DOA.

2) If you have copyrighted materials (i.e. a logo for instance or a famous character) it may not necessarily be rejected but the bar on quality goes up even further. Some companies like wallpapers of this nature, others do not, if a copyright or trademark holder comes to us and asks for a wallpaper they feel violates those rights to be removed, we will comply - it's their intellectual property.

3) Bryce means rejection normally.

4) Wallpapers are not judged purely on artistic merit. They are judged as WALLPAPERS. Things people put onto their desktops. This isn't an "art" site. You may upload the most incredible work of art ever but if it wouldn't work well as something that icons and windows will be on top of, it'll still likely get rejected.

5) We have a section for tileable wallappers (i.e. a tile would be say 64x64 that when tiled looks nice). We get few of these and are likely to accept those.

Version 3.2 has a significance on Windows XP that previous versions did not have.

WindowBlinds 3.0 used the XP "skinning engine" (for lack of a better term - it's really a set of APIs that read in and work with .msstyles files which is contained in a file called uxtheme.dll) for large portions of skinning.

But as 3.0 came out, some critics pointed out that there were certain parts that were not truly "native". Well, 3.2 goes the rest of the way. With WindowBlinds 3.2 installed on Windows XP, WindowBlinds skins are, as far as
the OS is concerned, no different than visual styles. They just have a different format. If one were to look very closely at the APIs called by uxtheme.dll and wblind.dll they would find that they now use the same ones
for virtually everything. Put anoter way, WindowBlinds 3.2 on XP is truly native. Any differences now is purely in the skin format. There is only one more thing to be done and that is to handle the window ghosting (when an
application is not responding it gets the classic title bar - contrary to popular believe, XP's visual styles just "Skin" the "classic" title bar and when an app isn't responding, Microsoft merely hooked the proper calls to
make it stay looking skinned - we still have to do this but since it's purely cosmetic we are currently focusing on increasing WB's advantage).

Where WindowBlinds really gains its advantage is in its skin format - .UIS. Ironcially, WindowBlinds 3.2 is much faster than visual styles on XP thanks to Windows 95. Why? Because UIS was designed at a time when systems were
slower and system resources were key. The result is that WB us much more efficient in resources which translates to performance as well than visual styles which were designed with XP in mind on systems with 128MB of ram or
more running P3 or better processors. You add some hardware acceleration and the WindowBlinds advantage increases further. Things will hopefully get even better when the new OFFICIAL NVidia drivers are released. We are
working closely with Nvidia to help make sure that the new drivers (not the leaked ones) work well with WindowBlinds. Nvidia and ATI have both been
using our XPBench program (www.xpbench.com) to help tune their video drivers which in turn makes WindowBlinds's hardware acceleration better.

Now, let's say you're running Windows 98, ME, the news is very good there too. We haven't forgotten those users since they represent the vast majority of people running Windows. If you're really bored, load up WindowBlinds 3.1A and then load your favorite set of programs and check how many free resources are left. Then load up WindowBlinds 3.2 and do the same. WB 3.2 uses substantially fewer resources than 3.1A which should
improve performance and compatibility.

Please download and try 3.2 from Object Desktop. Once it is ready we will release it to registered users of WindowBlinds. There will NOT be a public version of WindowBlinds 3.2. The next public version will be 3.25 or 3.3 sometime late next month.

TechTV has a really cool and relatively new show entitled "Call for Help". It's a really cool way to find out what's happening on the net. And in fact, they recently covered WindowBlinds on there.

http://www.techtv.com/callforhelp/answerstips/story/0,24330,2554315,00.html

Check out this TechTV article on WindowBlinds

http://www.windowblinds.net/skinning

Thank you Martin!

DesktopX 1.1 will be the first public Stardock product to support the new SDPlugin specification. A plugin made with this plugin spec will work on ObjectBar as well and in some cases WindowBlinds.

If you're a developer, visit the linked page to see some examples in action along with the SDK. There are some extremley cool things you can do with plugins and it's a great way to write software that will get used by thousands.

I recently read an article on OSOpinion (http://www.osopinion.com/perl/story/16200.html) by Kelly McNeill that essentially condemns personal customization in the form of skinning and themes. While such an article was probably written mainly to get attention (which he succeeded) I think the points raised need to be addressed.

McNeill argues that inconsistency in a user interface is a growing problem and the biggest culprits are programs that let users "skin" or "theme" things. The solution suggested is that OS vendors should ensure that skinning and theming is not possible. Part of this argument is valid - individual programs that are skinnable on a shared system can be problematic.

However, the overall argument is an over generalization. First off, as more and more users work on PC's with their own user accounts, the problem of Bill jumping onto Bob's machine and finding it completely unlike what Bill is used to will decrease. Secondly, many programs such as Object Desktop are designed to provide a consistent user environment across a machine or across an entire enterprise.

The reason why skinning and theming has become popular over the past few years is not merely an aesthetic issue, it's about improving usability. Just as people adjust their car seats and rear view mirrors in my car when they get in, they want to be able to adjust their desktop environment in a similar fashion.

History has shown that people like to personalize things. They do so for many reasons with productivity increases being just one of them.

Object Desktop, for instance, is designed to allow individuals or corporations transform Windows itself. Computers are tools. Let's not forget that. And to be effective tools, they must be customizeable to match the particular usage of the user using it.

McNeill's argument that all desktops everywhere should be identical flies in the face of decades of market research. Automobiles, phones, houses, home appliances, etc. are all personalized to meet the needs of different market segments. Computers, by their very nature, are much more malleable than physical products and can therefore be customized even further. "Skinning and theming", when applied correctly and effectively can therefore personalize desktops to match those needs.

My Grand Prix looks different and functions somewhat differently than my wife’s Ventura. But I have no problem getting into either and driving them. Is Kelly McNeill's opinion of computer users so low that they think that having an interface that looks and feels somewhat different is going to somehow cause those PC’s to be unusable? Unlikely.

A system that has been customized to the specific needs of the one using it is likely to be a more efficient and more effective interface for that user.
McNeil makes several references to "experts" citing quotes about how consistency is important. However, McNeil mistakes consistency across a particular user's environment for consistency across all personal computers.

From a productivity, support, and usability perspective, the goal of the user interface community is to eventually allow people to be able to have their personalized desktop follow them to any computer. If I log onto my friend's computer, my personalized desktop environment will follow me there allowing me to gain the benefits of my customized environment no matter where I am. With programs such as Object Desktop, this ideal is getting closer to reality (users can package up their desktop environments and download them anywhere but it's still a manual process). The argument that customization should be thwarted by OS makers so that all computers everywhere operate identically is chilling - particularly coming from someone who professes to have MacOS X as their primary OS.

What happened to "Think Different"? If people like Kelly McNeill had had their way 80 years ago, we’d all be driving black Model T’s today to our identical houses.

Skinning and theming has exploded in popularity over the past couple of years precisely because of its obvious benefits to users. It's not a movement driven by marketing but rather driven from the bottom up, users themselves wanting to improve their user experience, productivity, and enjoyment of using their PC's. These people lead the way and in doing so have awakened many a company to the benefits of personalized environments across an enterprise or on a per department level (or even a per individual level).