USA Today reviewed WindowBlinds 4 and it definitely made my day. Reviews
usually make me cringe. That's because often times, when you're a small company,
the reviewer cranks through the product in 10 minutes and whips up a review.
Even when the review is favorable, it's often full of errors.
But USA Today really nailed it. It was true vindication.
You see, the problem with tech software is that people often don't realize
just how dramatically it can improve over time. We still get people who
talk about how "buggy" WindowBlinds is even though the last time they tried it
was in beta back in 1999.
And for most of its history, WindowBlinds has had to do all kinds of clever
tricks to work on OSes such as Windows 98 and ME. The lowest common
denominator (those two OSes) locked us into having to make trade offs to
maximize compatibility and stability but would zap us in other areas such as
performance and sometimes flakey behavior on weird applications.
But WindowBlinds 4 was created we
decided to just focus on Windows XP as our target and then see what could and
couldn't be done on other OSes. We knew our target audience would mostly have
Windows XP. And Windows XP is a developer's dream. It is very customizable yet
is truly an industrial strength OS. As a result, we didn't have to make trade
offs, we could work with the theme system built into Windows XP. Plus we had a
lot of help from Microsoft to make sure our work played "by the rules".
Despite all that, you still will see users on-line say "WindowBlinds sucks,
it's slow and flakey" even though they never tried WindowBlinds 4.
The USA Today review deals with that right away by talking about the
previous version of WindowBlinds (v3) and talks about how it was good but
very imperfect an dhow much better WindowBlinds 4 is:
- Stardock Software's WindowBlinds 3, a nifty
Windows-skinner that allowed you to customize the Windows operating
system graphical interface, was good, but it was far from perfect. Not
every skin worked correctly and the WindowsBlinds 3 could leave your PC
and some applications less than stable, forcing some users to remove it
after the novelty wore off and headaches began.
WindowsBlinds is back with version 4, and it's a five-star product that
you won't want to uninstall anytime soon.
It was pretty clear that he knew the product and truly gave previous versions
a shot. A very refreshing review and as a developer at a small company, very
gratifying. Kudos to USA Today! Totally made my day. 
WindowBlinds 4's new configuration dialog.
