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 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.

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.

- 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

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 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.

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.

- 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


Brad

The number of unique visitors, that is, the number of different individuals that came to WinCustomize reached around 750,000 in November. Total number of visitors was well into the millions. WinCustomize doesn't use page views or visitors as its index of growth because we're interested in how many unique individuals are getting into customizing their machines.

The continued growth is good news for all those that like to customize their computers, create skins, create software that customizes, or just likes to hang out (though I wish our message boards got more use).

We expect traffic to significantly decrease next month. Why? Because there are now 3 new skin sites that should (we hope) begin to distribute the user base amongst more sites. For the past half year, essentially WinCustomize and DeviantART have split the traffic with the remainder going to SkinBase and elsewhere.

SkinBase, by our calculations, has seen a roughly DOUBLING of its traffic this month. It is clearly a website on the rise and one that anyone reading should definitely check out (www.skinbase.org).

But in November, 2 sites returned, desktoys.net and LotsOfSkins. In a few days, Deskmod should return. In all, there will be six major skin sites and several smaller ones.

So where has our traffic been coming from?

#1 Stardock is where 70% of our referrals come from. The parent company of this site is Stardock. So Stardock's health directly affects WinCustomize's health since as it gets more traffic, so does WinCustomize via referrals.

#2 TweakXP.com. (around 1%)That's right. Above any skin site, TweakXP sent more referrals to WinCustomize than any other customize related site.

#3 Customize.org. (around 1%). Customize.org has been up under different owners but was essentially the first skin site. It's hard to gauge how popular the site is but it must be quite popular to send so many thousands of users our way. We thank them for their support and comradeship.

#4 DeviantART (around .4%) returned to the top 5 this month. It, like WInCustomize, has experienced growing popularity. I'd trade some of our high download counts for their message board/news activity.

#5 Betanews.com (arond .4%) always hovers up there. Nate of Betanews has really been very instrumental in helping the community over the years (and not always appreciated for it).

Other sites of note:
DailyRotation: (.3%). This is THE news site for the customization community. They are a true news portal. Check them out www.dailyrotation.com.

Pixtudio: (.1%). The best of the best of skins can be found here. If WinCustomize is the Walmart of skin sites, then Pixtudio is the..um.. well that fancy store with the very best in quality stuff in it. You know, the store that smells good! The very best skins on the Internet can be found there. Okay, I'll be quiet now.

So where are we now?

We are going to open up 2 new sections next month (December) now that we have a bit of extended bandwidth. I won't give away what they are but one is for a freeware program, the other is a shareware program. Both are XP related.

We would like to look at adding some new non-XP sections. If you have a suggestion, put it below.

To qualify it must:
a) Have skins that are small (i.e. we want to avoid something that has 500K sized "themes"). Bandwidth is still very limited and I can tell you that DesktopX/Wallpaper/NeXTStart alone use 2/3rds of the bandwidth of this site. So if the program you want to support has skins of typically 500K or higher, no way. Sorry. Ideally it would be something that's typically 100K or less.

It has to be reasonably popular.

c) Has to work on Windows 98, ME, 2000, and XP. According to the sales stats, XP doesn't have more than 5% of the market (legally). Most people have Windows 98/ME/2000 and this site is WINCustomize not XPCustomize. We already feel pretty crappy about putting up 2 XP centric sections, we want to avoid adding more.


Anyway, things seem to be going pretty well.

WinCustomize got its bandwidth upped today by Stardock. WinCustomize now has more bandwidth than many company's internal networks have! Hope you notice the difference!

Stardock has put the first Windows XP-aware version of SkinStudio up on Object Desktop. This beta version makes it much easier for users to create, edit and import XP Start bars. SkinStudio is designed to make it relatively easy for anyone to create skins from scratch or to modify their existing skins for personal use. Skin authors have found SkinStudio's import feature to be powerful because they can easily use features from their other skins (such as buttons and scrollbars).

After a dynamic development period, HoverDesk rel. 2.40 is now publically available. HoverDesk 2.40 contains many new features and additions to existing features. Several are unique visual effects not found in other software. Others are new system access tools and organization tools. New features in 2.40 are:

- Autodetection of screen resolution (optional user setting).

- Drop Shadow and Outline text effects for tiles, menu entries and task tiles.

- Skinable / Stretchable Systray with optional drop shadows for icons.

- New HoverDesk theme manager with integtrated export and snapshot generator, wallpaper manager and more.

-Expandable applications list. (User option for adding specific applications to configuration dialog drop-down choices)

- New pop-up menu entries available for Common Program Menu / Common Startup Menu (NT) / My Images / Quicklaunch folders.

- Taskbar features: Auto Reorganization (no more gaps), New Hover texture.

- Recipient Tiles: Folder or .exe targets for drag-n-drop file management or launching.

- Theme De-bug feature for checking and fixing tile associations.

- Built-in Memory Defrag (CPU module

- Windows XP compatable.

and more ...

Be sure to read "ReadMe" files during installation for important information!!

HoverDesk website : http://www.hoverdesk.net
History file : http://www.hoverdesk.net/history.doc

To a newcomer, probably nothing is as melodramatic as the regular discussion of "community". To a newcomer, it's all a matter of taking what is ultimately a hobby way too seriously.

But on the other hand, I would also argue that of all the zillions of virtual communities out there, the customization (or "Skin") community has had a lot of impact which I would credit to its blend of grass roots and commercial strengths combining (grass roots strength with commercial marketing to bring that grass roots movement to the attention of the mainstream).

l0c elsewhere made a post wondering whether we were at a fork in the road. Where on the one hand you would have the people who see skinning at "Art" and the "hackers" who like to create and edit things with resource hackers on the other side of the fork. That two distinct communities would emerge.

I don't agree with that distinction. I think there is only 1 community broken up into niches. There are the people who see computers as more than just a means to an end. And many of those people want to have the ability to customize their computers to suit their unique and specific needs. That's the foundation of skinning.

Stardock's goal has been to allow as many people as possible into that world as possible. To provide so many different options to those people that it could make a business model out of it - Object Desktop. The more people who are part of our community, the better.

However, there are two sides of the coin. There, I think, those that would like to see things as a more intimate community where the casual users are kept out and it's just a core group of expert users who set the tone and direction of customization.

What are your thoughts? Do you see customization as being eventually mainstream where most people are using a combination of what's built in and third party solutions to control their OS or are we at a high point now and that it'll soon return to being where people are happy with whatever's built into the OS and everything else is marginalized to the hackers and super tweakers?

It's amazing that there are still people ignorant of copyright law.

1) There is plenty of case law demonstrating that websites ARE legally responsible if they do not remove copyright violations from servers they host upon notification.

2) A copyright violation is generally considered to be when a whole or significant part of a copyrighted work is used without license.

3) While it is true that you cannot protect inspirations under copyright, they are protected under other intellectual property laws if they are similar enough to create "reasonable confusion" (hence why Apple could legally eliminate Aqua-like skins if they so chose). Case law has put this under the term "Trade Dress".

Here's a link: http://www.tomwbell.com/writings/FullVTD.html#H2


Simply put, if you want to be a stickler, yes, you can stop people from creating "inspired" works of visual intellectual property.


4) Yes, even things that are "Free" are protected by intellectual property. If a website is found guilty of knowingly hosting copyrighted material, I believe under US law a plaintiff may sue for up to $125,000 (I'll have to dig more on that as it's been awhile). This law was primarily put into place so that small software developers (Back in the 80s) had some teeth when going after "pirate BBSes". Replace BBSes with websites and you have the same deal.

And finally:

Isn't it nearly always the case that those who don't create commodity level intellectual property that are the ones who seem to be really free with other people's?

So why hasn't Stardock gone after rippers directly?

Publicity. The best thing that could happen to one of these unethical sites would be to gain international media coverage and the quickest route to that would be for Stardock (or Microsoft or Apple or you name it) to go after them. So we'd only do such a thing as a last resort.

Tomorrow we should be increasing our bandwidth by 50% and adding an additional server. So hopefully by tomorrow evening the site will feel a lot faster.

Stardock releases WindowBlinds 3.0!

After months of effort Stardock has released its third generation of its popular GUI customization program, WindowBlinds. Version 3 of WindowBlinds adds a host of new features and on Windows XP makes WindowBlinds skins behave as native visual styles. It brings this technology to existing versions of Windows as well. Any Windows user running WindowBlinds 3 will be able to completely transform the Windows GUI to look however they want it to.

Stardock has focused on improving WindowBlinds’ performance to the point that it is, on Windows XP, faster than the bundled visual styles (Luna) when running a similar skin. It does this while using fewer resources and less memory as well. Stardock was able to do this by taking advantage of new hardware acceleration features in video cards (visit http://www.xpbench.com to see if your video card supports XP APIs). WindowBlinds 3 boasts a completely new architecture designed to minimize resource usage while providing new features such as SmartBars, Inclusion lists, Hyperpaint, per skin font/color customization, animated mouse-overs, and more.

For users of Windows 98, ME, 2000 WindowBlinds brings much of the new XP theming architecture over. In the coming months, users with WindowBlinds 3 on those versions of Windows will be able to take advantage of “XP theme aware applications”.

WindowBlinds allows users to customize nearly every part of the Windows GUI. Title bars, scrollbars, start bar, radio buttons, push buttons, etc. It can also add additional buttons to the title bar to enhance productivity such as roll-up buttons, URL buttons, always-on-top buttons, and more. It supports a fairly powerful but simple plugin format so that users can put nearly anything they want onto the Windows title bar.

The complete WindowBlinds 3 guide is at:
https://www.stardock.com/products/windowblinds/wb3/wb3_guide_final.htm

Users can download it at: http://www.windowblinds.net.


Screenshots:
https://www.stardock.com/products/windowblinds/wb-nov01.jpg
https://www.stardock.com/temp/wb3galore.gif
https://www.wincustomize.com/images/news/1182001101801PM1.jpg