We're hard at work making WindowBlinds 3.1.
So what's new in it over 3.0?
1) Tons of minor bug fixes.
2) 32bit TARGA support (for real time alpha blending of controls)
3) Animated Start button and taskbar buttons (not sure if this made it into 3.0 or not, it's in 3.01)
4) Gamma correction - now you can brighten or darken your skins on the fly.
5) Full SmartButton implementation (the final 3.1 will include XP PowerUser skin that uses this)
But the biggie is this:
6) UIS1 v3.
UIS1 is essentailly an Extended Style. UIS2 is full blown skins, UIS1 is a cross between what a visual style on XP could do and what a full blown skin can do.
Some of you who have been around awhile are famliar with UIS1+. UIS1+ replaced the original UIS1 (v1.0 from WB1.0). Our naming conventions are terrible I agree. The problem with UIS1+ was that the title bar heights HAD to be 23 pixels and there was no transparency allowed in title bars. As a result, it didn't get heavily used.
The new UIS1 supports transparancies on the title bar and any sized title bar image. Put anothre way, one could make a Luna (Windows XP style) skin with it that is identical to Luna.
So why use UIS1 when you can use UIS2? Here are some of the differences:
a) UIS1 is much faster. In our benchmarks using SkinBench http://sourceforge.net/projects/skinbench/ we've found that UIS2 is about 13% faster than Windows XP style (Luna blue) when compared to XPLuna (found on WinCustomize). HOWEVER, UIS1 is 40% faster than UIS2 (nearly twice as fast as a visual style would be on the system system and this is with the benchmark weighting changed to favor visual styles). SkinBench is an open source, third party GUI benchmarking program. Here is a link to a spreadsheet that shows our results and how we arrived at them. https://www.stardock.com/temp/wbbenchmark.xls. These particular benchmarks were done on an ATI Radeon 8500 at 1280x1024x16bit color.
UIS1 is much more Win98
c) UIS1 has fixed borders like Windows itself does. This means that some of the "weird" resizing and positioning issues that users occasionally report won't occur with a UIS1 skin.
Of course, there are disadvantages too:
-a) UIS1 borders are set size. Unlike UIS2 where each edge of the window can be its own size (this is what sometimes on some apps confuses them into thinking that the window is bigger than it really is) UIS1 borders are fixed. This isn't a big deal on Luna-like skins and other OS skins (like Aqua and MacOS 9 and QNX and OS/2, etc.) but many of the coolest skins have done neat things where the borders are irregularly shaped, rounded, jagged, or just different sized.
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You can't shape your title bar any old way. The transparencies need to be on the left and right sides. Feature wise, UIS1 is really just an extended visual style skin language. Its main advantage over Windows XP's visual styles are speed, cross platformness, and you can move the title bar buttons around, add more buttons, etc.
Generally, if you're a skin author and your skin can be done as a UIS1, then UIS1 is the way to go. But skinning is a creative endeavor. It is important to keep in mind that if people cared so much about performance and the other issues that they'd just stick with no skinning at all. My suggestion for skin authors is to pick the skin language that works best for your concept and the rest will take care of itself.
We'll be pushing UIS1 when it's ready to go. We still have some obstacles such as per application skinning (UIS1, unlike UIS2, sets the title bar size - how do you do that on a per app basis? How do you show previews of that in the display dialog?) but we expect by WB 3.1 that all the XP-like WB skins that can be made as styles will be provided as UIS1.
If you would like to see a tutorial of how easy it is to create a simple UIS1 skin (UIS1+ in this case) here is a link to one:
http://www.windowblinds.net/tutorial_skinning.doc
Stardock has released version 0.75 of ObjectBar. ObjectBar is a program that takes the best desktop interface features from Windows, Macintosh, Linux, OS/2, QNX, and elsewhere and combines them into a single program. With ObjectBar, users can create their own docks, wharfs, finders, bars, etc. to match their particular working habits and visual preferences.
Stardock's Object Desktop celebrated its second birthday from its original December 4, 1999 launch. It is amazing how far it has come and how risky the concept seemed at the time (A .NET software service many months before Microsoft would launch their own).
The suite not only includes themes for DesktopX, Hoverdesk, WinSTep, and ObjectBar(*).
UIS1 is much more Win98Frogboy friendly. Because it was designed after we had learned a lot about how to save resources on Windows 98, it is optimized to use fewer resources per window. Right now Windows XP is the hot thing and we have admittedly spent a lot of time making sure it works well on that OS. But we are also very aware that most users are using Windows 98 or ME and that we want to ensure that WindowBlinds works very well for them.