Version 6   I have to admit, I'm pretty excited about SkinStudio 6. Which is surprising in some respects because I was deeply involved in the design of SkinStudio 1 through 5.  With SkinStudio 6, the WindowBlinds team wrote it with my part being mostly that of providing input rather than design direction.  SkinStudio 1 through 5 was designed to provide a quasi-Corel Draw style user interface.  The design worked out well in the early days when WindowBlinds wasn't tha...

After a year of rewriting SkinStudio from scratch, Stardock has released SkinStudio 6.

SkinStudio is a free program designed to make it easy for people to create WindowBlinds skins.  Version 6 has been completely rewritten to provide a much simpler user experience for creating skins.

Making your own skinsSkinStudio makes it a snap to design your own skins for WindowBlinds.  When a user desires to create a new skin, they start out with either Luna (if it's on Windows XP) or Aero (...

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Microsoft Windows Vistawww.objectdesktop.comIntroductionIt's been over 5 years since the last major release of Microsoft Windows.  Back then, many people wondered "would people need Object Desktop with Windows XP?"  With all the great new features of Windows XP, why would anyone need a desktop enhancement suite designed to take the OS to the next level? Wasn't Windows XP the next level? As time has shown, millions of users looked to programs to enhance their Windows experience f...

ObjectBar is a program that is designed to enable users to create their own replacement Start bars or Finders or Wharfs or what have you. It's fully skinnable and can even inherit WindowBlinds skins. When it was first released, it was quite popular.  But over time, its popularity faded.  Windows XP provided a temporary boost as users of Windows 2000, 98, or ME could use ObjectBar to make their Start bars look like they do on Windows XP. 

Today, however, most users have Windows...

Visual Styles:

A visual style is a partiuclar type of "skin" designed to change the look and feel of the entire user interface of an operating system.

On Windows XP, there are two popular formats for visuals tyles - WindowBlinds and MSStyles.

WindowBlinds visual styles are designed to be more flexible than MSStyles but require the user to use the commercial program, WindowBlinds ($19.95) in order to get the most out of them.

MSStyles are very basic but are also free. They cannot move...

Today was the first nice weather here in Michigan in awhile. Actually went on a walk. And to help get into the spirit, I downloaded the latest version of Natural Desktop (www.naturaldesktop.com). It's a program that changes your wallpaper based on time of day as well as playing environmental sound.  It's the latter feature that makes it special for me.

So this morning it was playing sounds of morning doves and other birds.  As the afternoon passed you could hear other natural sounds...

Long before widgets, in the sense that we know them today, existed there was skinning. A skin is a collection of graphics designed to replace the user interface of a particular program. The first major skinnable program was Winamp.  Skinnable programs became very popular for awhile. During that time, we saw small, skinnable programs come out. These programs did one thing but they were skinnable.  Programs like Colorpad, Beatnik, Boxnote, Coolplayer, eNotes, EZPop, SkinCalc, XXCalc, Kew...