WindowBlinds 3

from WinCustomize Forums
Just got through reading the White Paper https://www.stardock.com/products/windowblinds/whitepaper_wb3.html and found it very interesting.

I'm already using WB XP, so it will be less of a drastic change as it will be for a lot of people, but there is a lot of cool new stuff on the way, even for WB XP users.

Looks like an exciting time for Stardock and the skinning community in general.
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Reply #1 from WinCustomize Forums Top
I just read it. One thing in the white paper that I liked and hadn't given much thought to were apps that are not theme aware results in an inconsistent GUI in XP.

Even if people are not big into themes it seems to me that WB3 will be compelling to some from the sake of consistency by "making up" for the "old" apps that aren't theme aware.

I imagine there are people out there that think XP alone will magically transform all applications into XP-themed apps.

Or did I misread it and XP do this already to some extent?

Reply #2 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Yeah, that caught my attention too, Chris. I haven't used the native skin format a whole lot, so I never noticed that.

I do think that MS did a generally good job, both in style and what they did with the Start menu and the taskbar. It just doesn't go far enough, and that's where WB3 comes into play.
Star Control: Origins
Reply #3 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Exactly.

Here's a close up on those screenshots:
https://www.stardock.com/products/windowblinds/xp/xp-noskin.jpg
This is Windows XP as is.

BTW, even Office XP isn't theme aware, if you use Office XP under WIndows XP, your scrollbars and buttons and such are all Windows 95 style.

Now, apply WindowBlinds 3 (which can skin the XP Start bar completely):
https://www.stardock.com/products/windowblinds/xp/xp-xpskinned.jpg

It makes it easy to have a "free" version and the enhanced version. The free version can just do what Windows XP normally does -- skin the UI half-way.

The full version can do the full skinning, change colors, do smart bars, etc.

I think the memory issue is pretty key. Did you read the part about how WB3 only loads the components of a skin that a program needs? Right now, every process gets the full skin attached to it (scrollbars, group boxes, the whole works) even if it's just a dialog with nothing but a button. That's a lot of RAM that adds up. But in WB3, it's much smarter.

And hopefully users will not longer say "WindowBlinds is slow and bloated" because it'll be identical in those areas to Windows XP.

Reply #4 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Yeah, the new memory management sounds pretty cool, Frogboy. Does it have internal compression, ala DesktopX?
Reply #5 from WinCustomize Forums Top
No, nothing like that presently. DX can do that since thre's animation and other states can be compressed. But in WB, your windows are always there. Only when they're minimized would that make sense and then it coudl cause a minute performance hit. Memory use by WB 2 isn't too bad, WB 3 is much better so the biggest thing we have to keep focused on is speed. People wouldn't stand for saving 100K of RAM if it meant a 10% speed hit.
Reply #6 from WinCustomize Forums Top
This pleases AJ greatly, Oct 16th isn't soon enough though. If I had a whip long enough to reach Michigan, it would be cracking right now. One question though, the NVF sounds really nice, but will it work from a postscript format such as EPS, or will it work more like a markup language like VML or SVG?
Reply #7 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Okay, that makes sense about memory compression. I agree that it doesn't sound like a very good idea for WB3.

Do you guys have any WB3 skins completed in house yet? That is, complete skins that support the taskbar and Start menu?