The new Dragon visual style from Stardock Design doesn't just look great, it's fast. For most users, Dragon makes Windows faster than the default look of either Windows XP and especially Windows Vista. On top of that, it has stunning animation on the Start menu at full 30fps. And did we mention it does this without slowing down your PC?  This is what happens when you develop a technology that integrates seamlessly into the native Windows display engine while taking advantage of advances in ...

Making your own color presetsOne of the coolest new features of WindowBlinds 6 is the ability to selectively color parts of a skin. Combined this with another new WindowBlinds 6 feature - user created substyles and you have customization heaven.

For this demo, I'm going to show off a skin that hasn't been released at the time of this writing - Turbo.  Turbo is a new skin from Stardock Design that is being released exclusively for Object Desktop users.  It's not quite done yet - you ...

OverviewWindowBlinds is a program for Microsoft Windows that enables users to change the look and feel of the Windows GUI.  By look and feel, we mean literally change the way title bars, push buttons, the Start bar, scrollbars, and nearly every other element of the interface of Windows.  These changes are then inherited by the programs running on your system to deliver a consistent look across most of your programs.

WindowBlinds changes the look and feel by applying skins (called vi...

Plymouth, MI- (August 31, 2006) – Stardock Entertainment is pleased to

Version 5Preview GuideOur story so far..WindowBlinds is a program that can completely customize the Windows user interface (title bars, star bar, push buttons, scrollbars, etc.).Since its initial release in 1999, 4 versions of WindowBlinds have been released.  When Stardock began working on WindowBlinds, no one else had ever attempted to do something like it.  Getting it to work on the various versions of Windows was a real challenge and in early versions, performance was sacrificed to...

WindowBlinds is a program that enables users of Microsoft Windows to apply themes (which we refer to as "skins" or "visual styles") that change the look and feel of your Windows GUI. However, WindowBlinds 4.5 allows users to change the color of each particular "theme". Traditionally, people would download a given "theme" and if it wasn't the color they liked, they were out of luck. Now, with WindowBlinds 4.5's hue/saturation support, the skin's default colors are only the beginning...

Le...

WindowBlinds 4.5 is out and holy cow is it cool! First off, I should probably explain to those of you not familiar with WindowBlinds what it is:

WindowBlinds is a program that enables you to completely change the look and feel of Microsoft Windows's user interface (i.e. title bars, push buttons, Start bar, scrollbars, etc.). 

Let's take a quick, step by step, journey through what that exactly means.  Below is a screenshot of the popular voice over IP program Ventrilo.



So...

WindowBlinds 4.5 is nearly ready for release. One of the highlights is the new hue changing colorization system.

Just move some sliders and the colors of your skin change. Works very well.



To enable this, you have to go to the WindowBlinds config, click on colorization and then turn it to HSL coloring. I don't know if I'll ever go back to the other system.

Ah customization of Windows. It's a gradual process.  Using the popular voice over IP chat program, Ventrilo, let's take that journey with WindowBlinds 4.5.



...In the beginning there was Windows classic. And it was good. Simple, fast clean.  Then Windows XP came and it came with a skin (known as "visual styles" when you're "skinning" the entire GUI).



And so the title bars and borders were changed. And it was still good. But not complete. For only theme-aware applications...

For fun I used Archive.org to look at the daily downloads of the top 5 WindowBlinds skins from 2002 and compared them with where they are today:

WindowBlindsSep-02Sep-041st148018762nd140715923rd81512334th4668655th403734Total45716300

So the good news is that WindowBlinds skins seem to be getting more and more popular over time showing that third party Windows customization continues to grow as a trend.

Here are the finalists for the top visual style for WindowBlinds spots.  This is a very challenging event to judge.  After all, what exactly makes a visual style "the best"? Is it the features that they use? The usability of it? The subtle touches? How innovative it is? And then, which features should matter?

For example, Pixel8 made the best use of the dialog background skinning feature. Take a close look at its screenshot and see how much that adds.  On the other ha...