Release Notes:
------------

This build is the first beta for the upcoming WindowBlinds 5. There are going to be some rough edges as it gets out in wider distribution, so please be as detailed as possible with any feedback.

Requirements:
Windows XP.  Does not support Windows 2000 or Windows XP 64-bit (64-bit version will come later though).

The Big One - Per-pixel borders on XP

-Per-pixel (alpha-blended) titlebars and borders. It's been an internal struggle over the last year or more as to whether we would be able to implement these on Windows XP with reasonable performance. We have, _if_ you have a relatively modern video card and good drivers for it.

What does that mean? Your video card needs to have hardware support for alphablending and a driver with SHADEBLENDCAPS support implemented and functional. ATI Radeon's 9000+ or later should be fine, NVIDIA GeForce 6000+ or later should be fine, and even chips that you wouldn't expect like the integrated Intel 82852/82855 GM/GME run fine with it.

Some boards are not going to work with this release, though we hope to be able to work with the driver vendors to find a workaround. GeForce 4600/5200 and related seem to be a common trigger for that (like they are losing the alpha channel for the images). The top/bottom borders with per-pixel skins seem oversaturated, but the left/right borders are working (and you can click "through" the top border).

Yes, you can put shadows on your borders and make them part of the skin. See the Arrow sample that is included. The shadows are part of the skin.

Other new features:

By Per-Pixel, we mean elements that have full alpha blending support (anti-alias themselves to whatever graphical elements are around it).

• -No wbload.exe process. The binary is still there for installing skins.
• -Per-pixel menus
• -Per-pixel taskbar
• -Per-pixel progress bar overlay
• -Per-pixel "Please wait" dialog
• -New wbconfig previews
• -New skincast features (not in this build)
• -Lots of optimizations under the hood.

When reporting problems, please check the Troubleshooting section of WBConfig. Select the text with the left-mouse button and press Ctrl-C to copy the text. Please include that when reporting any visual-bugs along with a screenshot (cropped if appropriate for size).

There is an updated SkinStudio beta available to Object Desktop customers with support for creating per-pixel skins. You must still include the non-pp images for systems that don't support the new frames, so the skins should still work with WB 4.x.

Note: To change skins you have to load WBConfig now.  There's no system tray icon yet.  You can change skins from display properties (msstyles now show up side by side with WindowBlinds skins btw) or you can put a short-cut to WindowBlinds config somewhere handy like on the Quick Launch or use Keyboard LaunchPad to assign a hot-key to bring it up.

Enjoy!