I just bought Medal of Honor - it's 1.2 GIGS on the hard drive! Insane. Just ship it on DVD and let me play it that way!

Many users swear by Notepad in their creation of WindowBlinds skins. That's usually becaue when they got started, notepad was the best way to do it. Early versions of BuildBlinds and SkinStudio just weren't easy enough to get the job done.

But that's changing. A use can now create a skin in a matter of hours rather than days by using some of the features of SkinStudio to their advantage.

Here are a few links to help get started:
If you don't have SkinStudio you can get it at http://www.skinstudio.net

Here is a link to the UIS 2 skin tutorial: http://www.windowblinds.net/skinning/2-uis2tutorial.html

One of the best tutorials I've seen and best third party one for sure is here:
http://www.aleksyandr.com/tutorial.htm

Aleksyandr did a great job on this.

Now for me, I'm lazy. Dangerously lazy. And for that reason, what I do is literally draw up my GUI in say Photoshop how I want it to look. Then I load up SkinStudio and choose new blank skin. It then creates a completed Luna style skin. From there, I then go to file->load template image and load up my template bitmap.

From there, I can literally select the pieces I want and press the cut button and it will do the work for you. No need to mess with different button states and such because it does it for you.

There will be a more complete article on this feature soon. But for now, that feature will save you a lot of time. The real work should be in creating the graphics, not having to mess with the skin language itself.

If you have any specific questions on skinning, respond here and I'll ask someone from Stardock (or I'll do it myself) to respond with some info on it. Good luck and have fun!

ObjectBar is one of the final key pieces to Stardock's overall Object Desktop design.

The Windows user interface can be broken into 3 principle parts:

1) The GUI
2) The desktop
3) The program/task manager

WindowBlinds takes care of the GUI. DesktopX takes care of the desktop, and now ObjectBar will take care of the program/task management part.

Every OS has some sort of bar, wharf, finder, dock, center, whatever that allows users to quickly and easily manage their programs, running tasks, and system settings. On Windows it's called the Start bar, on MacOS it's called the Finder. On OS/2 it's called WarpCenter, on Linux it's often called a Wharf.

ObjectBar is designed to combine all the best features of all the OSes, add many unique features never before seen so that users can create the ultimate desktop environment.

ObjectBar is designed with productivity first in mind. It is designed first and foremost for corporate use. The fact that it is has what may be the most flexible skinnable interface seen in such a program is more of a bonus feature. Stardock does not want users to use it because it's skinnable but because it works better than what comes with the OS.

The new version of ObjectBar can even use WindowBlinds XP start bar skins. This means that users of Windows 98/ME/2000 can download those WB skins and when they apply the skin, ObjectBar will automatically use those skins on itself.

Give it a try!

https://www.stardock.com/products/objectbar/objectbar.jpg

Whatcha think?

We're received a considerable amount of email from skin authors asking when they can start submitting. Originally we weren't going to allow submissions until February 1. But given the interest we're getting, we are going to allow submissions to begin now.

We won't publicly display your skins until Febuary 1. However, starting this week we will begin displaying how many skins each website's team has submitted so that you can keep score of how the different websites are doing.

I found this site that has pictures of many of the regulars in the skin community:

http://www.angelfire.com/nj2/mttraulsen/Pictureland.html

What a cool idea (whoever's it was). Putting a name to a face is really cool.

Here's a recent (yesterday) picture of me in case someone's curious what I look like.

https://www.stardock.com/temp/brw.jpg

Windows isn't the only place that lots of cool things are happening. Linux users have been skinning for years. Read on for a basic primer on what's happening over there.

Why must toddlers constantly open up and put..things...into the CD ROM drives of computers?

For those of you really into user interface design, here are a couple of temporary links to IBM's famed Common User Access (CUA) interface guidelines. These guidelines were developed to create computer software interfaces that are more accessible.

These are pretty technical and in PDF format. The links are:

https://www.stardock.com/temp/cua-1.pdf
https://www.stardock.com/temp/cua-2.pdf

After 2 months of development, Stardock has released the first public update to WindowBlinds 3.

Version 3.1 supports a new skin language dubbed Extended Visual Styles (UIS1) that are literally twice as vast as XP's visual styles, work on every version of Windows, and are more compatible (downside is that they aren't nearly as powerful as UIS2 skins which is what most skins are done in).

Here is an article that talks about the new features and how skin authors can make the most of them:

http://www.windowblinds.net/wb3/wb31.html