per brad: msstyle v uis skin format

I was probably the first one around here to make an msstyles skin - back last December of 2000. Back then, the format allowed for a bit more such as skinnable menus.

But yes, I am familiar with what can be done with build 2600 msstyles and more importantly, what can't be done. Also, other than Microsoft and Ian here at Stardock, I probably am more familiar than anyone else on how they are implemented down to which APIs are called in what order (including undocumented APIs).

That said, I'll write some facts/myths into the next post so that I don't end up with a Frogboy(TM) mega post that meanders all over.

BTW, before I dig in, I want to thank Mephisto for making his post. THIS (in my view) is what skin site message boards were created for.

What msstyles "skins" that WindowBlinds can't as of WB 3.2:

1) WindowBlinds does not support mouse overs on radio buttons and check box controls.

2) WindowBlinds does not currently skin slider controls

3) WindowBlinds does not currently skin spinner controls.

4) WindowBlinds currently does not support changing the web tasks panel on XP explorer.

5)WindowBlinds does not yet skin the little arrow thingies in the Start bar.

6)Does not currently skin the XP file dialog completely.

However, I am getting the feeling you haven't been using or keeping up on WindowBlinds progress. To put it in perspective, WindowBlinds 3.1A was released in mid January. A month later we now skin the following controls that we didn't before:

1) WindowBlinds does skin the logon/logoff buttons in XP now in 3.2.

2) WindowBlinds does skin the header controls beyond stretching (does here anyway).

3) WindowBlinds skins IE scrollbars in XP as well as the actual controls inside a web page.

Re your statement "msstyles wins in quantity".

No, I don't agree and it can be proven that WindowBlinds skins FAR FAR more. Some examples:

1) WindowBlinds allows for animated title bars. XP only allows for 2 states in the title bar - active and inactive. WindowBlinds supports active, inactive, and disabled along with animated states (msstyles used to support the disabled state but took it out for some reason).

2) WindowBlinds supports animated start buttons - again more states.

3) WindowBlinds supports animiated scrollbars - again more states.

4) WindowBlinds skins menu backgrounds

5) WindowBlinds skins menu borders

6) WindowBlinds skins menu items (I don't lump these 3 into one because menus are a LOT more of a major item than say those little arrow thingies on the Start bar).

7) WindowBlinds fully skins MDI child window buttons - maximize a child window in XP where the min/max/close buttons show up in the menu bar, msstyles doesn't even support a DOWN state for that which is very unprofessional and a step back from classic even - I'd call this a bug in msstyles but it has to do with the hackish way they were implemented.

8) Title bar buttons can be scripted - it is incorrect to say that WindowBlinds buttons only support 6 states because scripting allows for title bar buttons to have a *user defined* number of states. For example, in one skin putting the mouse over the title bar button causes the button to pulsate. Obviously that's more than 6 states.

9) Scrollbar backgrounds can be animated.

10) The back of title bar text can be skinned.

11) WindowBlinds can skin the background of explorer windows with a texture and supports active and inactive states in doing so.

I could think of several more with a bit more time. But that should suffice for now. And I'm not even talking about features like the fact that WindowBlinds skins can have rounded bottom corners or that the system icon can be centered or put on the right and the other skinnable features, extra button support, sound effects, plugins, alpha blending, etc.

Re polish:

Consider how far in that area WindowBlinds 3 has come. Stardock also has to focus on Windows 98, ME, NT, and 2000 users who represent the vast majority of users. The number of end users who buy software (as opposed to pirating) who use Windows XP is very small right now so we have to focus on those other platforms.

I would also point out that Windows XP alone is far less polished to a new user than WindowBlinds. Why? Because a new user of Windows XP is going to find that half their applications are not skinned completely. They are going to notice MS Word XP not having its scrollbars skinned a lot sooner than they're going to notice whether the left side of the file dialog has a texture.

And being a download fanatic of download.com and betanews, I can tell you that new applications coming out are still not generally "theme aware".

And so we have:

Windows XP by default:
http://www.windowblinds.net/xp/without.jpg

Windows XP with WindowBlinds:
http://www.windowblinds.net/xp/with.jpg

Put another way, the ONLY way to make Windows XP look like Windows XP consistently is WindowBlinds.

The 6 GUI elements that you mention that I list that WB doesn't skin will get skinned in time - long before Windows XP is the mainstream version of Windows.

Another advantage of UIS over msstyles that doesn't get talked about - people know a UIS skin is going to work on Longhorn or even Service pack 1 of Windows XP. There's a pretty good chance that msstyles may not even work anymore after SP1 if MS moves the security features closer to the system (I can tell you for a fact that Microsoft does NOT like third party msstyles floating around).

But yea, I've messed with msstyles since the first beta they showed up and have continued to mess with them as new versions of StyleBuilder have shown up and with resourcehacker. And of course, we have developers here who have disected visual styles in tons of ways you can probably imagine.

I won't go into WindowBlinds's advantage in themselves since this is a discussion of which visual style format is better - .msstyles or .uis. But one of them is not moving forward, the other one is. One of them is faster than the other. One of them has a lot more features. One of them works on more applications (contrary to claims by certain developers of "100% compatibility - try that on a Delphi app).

Msstyles is pretty good. It should be pretty good, it was modeled on WindowBlinds to begin with (it's especially apparent in 2419 when they even had a fake title bar then like WB did until 3.2).

Mephisto...
As a small-time WB skinner [of horrid results] I'd be interested to see if someone as versed in msstyles as yourself could perhaps 'port' or replicate say, my 'BlindJAFO-X' WB skin to be used with msstyles.

OK, so the included 'On-Top' and 'Roll-Up' buttons aren't going to do too much it seems, but maybe you can manage to get the 3 main system buttons [max, min, and close] over onto the left side, as is possible with WB.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure I'm up to spending 20 bucks on the Styles proggy and have it cease to function if and when MS addresses it in a SP release.

My WB skins may be daggy but they do tend to be different...

Another point is the WB basic skin format (UIS1+). This format is designed to skin apps that have trouble with regular WB skins. These are are not only faster, but have features like skinning minimized MDI windows and 15 border styles. The format is a subset of the regular WB format, but I doubt that it has less features than MS styles.

alright, i think we're in need of a visual aid...

oh look, there just happens to be one right here! how nifty!

http://www.angelfire.com/nt2/mephistocorugant/webview.html

that, gentlemen and ladies, is how i see these two skinning options, with windows classic as a nice baseline.

THAT is the direction i'm coming from with all this, not as an msstyle fanboy as i'm thinking jafo assumes, not as a completely unknowledgable person...

and, just an aside, brad, please, no marketing? please? i've read the primers, seen the shots, know the story, but this isn't from a marketing standpoint that i wanna look at this. i'm looking from a 'how much of windows gets skinned?' area.

it's like, it's like forest for the trees. no offense at all intended, just that, like in the diagram, windowblinds has been so focused on trying to out feature-set everything else (chroma, msstyles, efx, etc.) that it's yet to actually get to a good position to start out feature setting things.

hmmm, lemme try and clarify that with an overworked and very tired cliche...

the car analogy: yippie, hoorah, gimme a break...

let's say ferrari wants to get into the sedan market come the new model year. what do they do? they go out, look at their main competition, namely mercedes and bmw, and see what they offer in the, say, mid-size luxury sedan area. now, ferrari sees the m5, sees the s-class, sees the v8 in the m5 and the v8 in the s-class, and decides to put out a mid-sized luxury sedan with a v10.

fast forward to october, new models come out (after testing, etc. cause we can't have safety concerns) and ferrari starts selling it's sedan. it markets it as the fastest sedan in the world. doesn't sell. after 1 bad year the project's cancelled and ferrari goes back to making sporty "fighters on tires" again.

why? well, ferrari was so occupied with trying to do what they do best, namely, make fast as shit cars, that they didn't stop to think whether they should actually have aminities in the sedans to bring them (and here's where i'm going with this)

UP TO AND INLINE WITH THE BASELINE COMPETITION'S OFFERINGS.

that's the thing...i'm in no way doubting that windowblinds is fast (hell, i'm using it now, and have been since 3.2 went rc1 a couple days ago) and i know it's fast. that's not the point that i'm trying to make.

we all that've replied know windowblinds' feature set. we all know the uis1 (which i've released one skin under madice) and we all know about hyperpaint, extra buttons (which are more useful than most will admit, and that's not even for extra functionality buttons [on top, rollup]), and skinning anything without a manifest file.

though, as an aside, yes, windowblinds skins more apps. very true. but, apps aren't at question here. just baseline windows controls and the various states and permutations of them. think more focused yet step back further, that kinda thing.

to summarize: windowblinds is superior from a skinning platform perspective.

very true.

but, windowblinds' percentage of skinned windows controls, at this current 3.2 build, is still sub-par to msstyles, taking into account the overlap between the two (gradiented area on the above Visual Aid(c)). THAT's what i'm harping about, not the feature set, just the percentage.

perhaps another analogy.

gaming consoles: why're they so popular and the games for them so much better than computer games?

part of the reason: consoles don't change from person to person. if jafo has a playstation, and brad has a playstation, their playstations will be identical within a few percent ( mostly due to just small changes between the runs they were made during, ram chip manufacturer contract changes, trivial stuff like that)

now, aside from the xbox, consoles are no where near as powerful as computers. i'm sure everyone here can agree to that. so why then do console games look so much better and play so much better than computer games?

controlled environment...since no consoles change, it's easier to eek every last drop of performance and gaming ability out of them, with work mind you. the envelope can be ripped open and pushed like one of those little baby pop lawn mower things around the room making a lot of racket in the process. computer game makers, on the other hand, must bow to a lowest common denominator approach to making games. they can't push the envelope without alienating a possible market segment.

hmmm, i don't think this is going anywhere. i was gonna say something about wb being a blank canvas and that not really giving people a reason to push the envelope, but, upon thinking about it and not being quite as half-asleep as i was when i thought about it, it doesn't seem to matter much here, so, forget the last little bit...

again, summary:
1) i never, ever said msstyles had more features than windowblinds, and i'm sorry if you got that out of my above post, but i never wanted to convey that idea.

2) all this boils down to my feelings that windowblinds needs to focus more on skinning more controls, and skinning more controls more logically....

for example: toolbar menus (IE, explorer itself) why aren't they skinned as a menu? they're a menu, why aren't they skinned as such? and the open/save dialogs (though i'm glad to hear those'll get some focus soon).

i mean, right now windowblinds can sit inside a 3 meg footprint given a truly optimal skin, quite easily i'm sure. so, why not backup on some of the shortcuts that were made to get it there so that a more complete skinning experience is arrived at, see what i'm saying?

that's what i'm hoping this ends up with...3-6 months down the road having windowblinds TRULY be able to replace msstyles fully, and then some.

alright, think that's about it, so ponder what i've said a bit, reply as deemed necessary, let caffeine reign supreme

meph

Hehehe! All this is way beyond me.
I can't say I understood much of your post meph.

Just a side note concerning the number of applications supported by WB... Most of the applications I use are on my exclusion list because too many weird things happen when they get skinned: Flash, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Director, (and of course Skin Studio) all are excluded...
I really just use the skins with (Windows and Internet) Explorer...

Mephisto, you are the man. I'd hug you if you were here. But you are also very evil. Why can't you wait to post this until after work? Now I'm going to have to wait hours before I can do a real reasponse.

Jafo - blindJafoX couldn't be done as an msstyle for te following reasons:

1) Title bar style is BeoOS style
2) Left border is larger than other borders
3) Left bottom corner is irregularly shaped
4) Buttons are on left
5) Title bar text has a background
6) MDI buttons have a down state

Another way to look at it, if a skin can't be converted to UIS1, it can't be done as an msstyles. UIS1 is a superset of msstyles (except for the 6 skin elements I described earlier) and UIS1 cannot do all that UIS2 can do.

That said, I agree with many of Mephisto's points. And WB is continuing to remove the remaining handful of items that msstyles supports that WB does not. The journey from 3.0 to 3.2 hopefully demonstrates that.

paxx:
I use Photoshop, Director, SkinStudio with WB on a daily basis without problem. You try WB 3.2 yet? You running XP or 2K or 98/me?

In Photoshop, whenever I open or create a new document, the titlebar is off the screen at the top making it impossible to grad and drag in the middle of the work space. Other issues with other apps vary:
- weird scrollbars behaviors in Director;
- ghost display (GUI doesn't seem to redraw properly) in Flash. Although this happens often in general, it's particularely aggravating when I'm actually doing some work;
- Dreamweaver and UltraDev seem to work fine now. I don't remember what my issue was with it before. Maybe just that it's confusing sometimes to work with a skin as opposed to the plain classic Windows style.

And before you ask, yes my display drivers are up to date. I have a Matrox Marvel G450 eTV 32 Megs, and 512 Megs of RAM.

Which OS?

There are indeed many features to be added. The reason they're not in yet is because there simply aren't enough programmer-hours to put them in and to improve performance at the same time. Also, remember that WFX has also been soaking up coder workload.
So what has happened is that performance has been the focus for 3.1 and (especially) 3.2 - and this has been noticed and recieved positive comment in many places (eg Neowin forums). Now that 3.2 is nearing release and there's a solid performance advantage to build on, I'd expect more time to be spent on adding those features which are most wanted by skinners and users.

I get weirdness with Photoshop as well. While the latest build of WB seems to clear up the problem with the titlebar, when I open more then one pic the mouse gets thrown off by as much as 2 inches (makes detail work really interesting .

WinXP
Matrox Mystique

"3) WindowBlinds skins IE scrollbars in XP as well as the actual controls inside a web page."
-Frogboy

When I first noticed it I thought I had somehow subconsciously stolen buttons from Yahoo.

Brad, yes, I know the reasons that my skin cannot be replicated in msstyles....it's the whole single reason I do them this way....because they ARE different from the 'standard' Windows format.

There's something 'fun' about control buttons being on the left....confusing for a while, but fun all the same..

I use LiteSTEP to be as different from the 'standard' Microsoft XP experience as I can, and WindowBlinds, like-wise...

Windows XP, Brad.

Jafo, I once made a skin with the control at the bottom, and most people were asking me to put the controls at the top, that it was too weird to have them down there. My skin was made to look like a Handspring Visor (a handheld computer). People are conservative sometimes.

paxx - try WB 3.2, I suspect most of the issues you had are gone with that.

Jafo - I knew you knew. Your skins are good examples of why people skin in the first place.

Ok, I've had a little time to respond to Mephisto's points so here it is:

I don't feel you addressed my points, Mephisto. You dismiss it as "marketing". I feel that's a total cop out. I demonstrated that WindowBlinds does skin more GUI elements than msstyles does. I'm not talking more features, I'm talking strictly GUI elements.

To a new user who has just installed Windows XP, what are they going to notice?

With Visual styles they will notice immediate:
#1 The MOST of their applications are not completely skinned. This is a big one and there's no way this can be dismissed. When half of a given program's controls are still Windows 95 style, that's pretty darn noticeable.

When they install WindowBlinds what will they notice?
#1 That menus are now skinned. This is something that will show up very early on in using it because menus are such a common part of the GUI.

#2 They will notice that the spin controls and a handful of of uncommon controls are not skinned.

But when it comes to providing a consistent environment, there is no way a reaosnable person is going to conclude that XP "skins more". Because even by your argument, it can only skin more in theory - on theme aware apps of which there is only a handful. Sure, eventually most apps will be theme aware, but by that time, WB will have long since skinned even the most obscure control.

You assert that "short cuts" were taken to get to low memory consumption. This simply isn't the case. The evidence you used to back that up seems to focus on having fewer states by default (like for title bar buttons). But when I point out that WindowBlinds can have an infinite number of states via scripting or with conditional visibility you dismiss that as marketing. WB uses less memory for many reasons. One example is that a WB title bar button can have as few as 3 states where the skin author can use visibility codes to determine when they are displayed. That sort of thing adds up.

You also argue that we haven't focused on skinning more controls. This is also not true. I pointed out just how many new things WB skins since 3.0 and it's only been a couple of months. How much has msstyles changed in the last 2 months? Zero.

The bottom line is that WindowBlinds IS skinning more and more controls. But developer resources are at a premium and in our estimation, the lead WindowBlinds has over msstyles in providing an overall consistent environment on Windows XP (i.e. by skinning a LOT more on XP than XP does) is so massive that we currently can focus our energies to making WindowBlinds faster and more reliable.

When people criticize WindowBlinds, they don't start by saying that it doesn't skin spinner controls. They start by saying that it is "slow" or "buggy". As such, we have focused on addressing those concerns. And the results speak for themselves. When I visit Neowin.net now, most people who post now admit that WindowBlinds IS faster than msstyles. This is quite a change from even 2 months ago. And no longer do you see people posting how it's unstable or crashes (not often anyway). We still have to make sure that Win98/ME/NT/2000 users are taken care of - to make sure that it continues to improve for them since they vastly outnumber Windows XP users.

alright, so, we're back to this i see...

firstly, and what i feel is one of the major points that we're both dancing around, is the primer you wrote when wb 3 first came out.

convenient link: http://www.windowblinds.net/xp/wb3advantages.html

that is where all this stemmed from, most notably the 'windowblinds 3 fully skins windows xp' part of the document (in the title for all those playing along at home)

now, i may just be completely deanse, but to me at least, your first lengthy response tends to read (aside from the first bulleted list) just like that primer. same example images, same arguments, you get the idea.

now, nothing against that, but, i just read that as more marketing, and THAT's what i meant by 'please, no marketing?' sorry to kind of over-generalize that, but, read it again and tell me that they both don't read kind of similarly. course, could just be me.

now, to try and restate/answer what's been brought up...this may take a while...

first and foremost: i never argued that windowblinds wasn't making progress. i know it's made progress. i've seen the progress. what i said was that that progress was secondary to speed increases. (i'm gonna shoot myself for this but) your own marketing tells this. every new build on component manager since 3 has touted 'performance/compatibility improvements' whereas the only build to tout new features were 3.15 and now 3.2 with ie skinning and global image cache respectively. so, by that i can therefore assume that performance and compatability were higher on the development white board than new features, aside from ie skinning which i assume would be considered a biggy because that's what most people were noticing wb didn't skin.

i think part of our failure to adequately communicate is that you and i hold onto our respective views of each other a bit too strongly. i know i do it, it's human nature and it's hard to let go of, but hopefully by the end of this you'll see that i have to an extent done so in order to try and more clearly get arguements resolved.

i write like an engineer, it's so sad...

alright, so, before i tried to get this across, and i guess it just didn't sink in well enough.

let's focus. let's focus on windows itself. no apps unless they're tied into (read: bundled like IE) with windows xp. i concede that windowblinds skins more apps (though i never really argued otherwise, but we're trying to resolve things, not start new ones...)

again, the image i made above applies because i based it off of an arguement based on JUST windows itself and internet explorer, explorer, notepad, etc. basic 'fresh install of xp out of the box' apps.

now then, i'm gonna try and rephrase your above bullet lists and and tell me if you think this is a fair assumption:

windowblinds, with respect to captions and the things thereof, namely buttons, text, has more features than msstyles, and it skins menus that aren't toolbars.

true? true...now, i know that windowblinds has the ability to set different visibility settings for buttons in order to get more states for a button. i was wrong about that. but, the animated start button/scrollbars/buttons in general (on mouseover/click only though if i'm not mistaken) i don't feel is a valid arguement with regard to states. YES, windowblinds allows for animations, but, those all boil down to being just for one state, hover/onmouseover. the states i was referring to was with, for instance (just an example) scrollbar thumbs. in windowblinds by default they have 3 states: normal, pressed, mouseover. they simply aren't drawn in the disabled state. with msstyles, by default, scrollbar thumbs have a normal, mouseover, pressed, disabled state. the same holds true for checkboxes/radio buttons. in windowblinds they merely have normal and checked states, with mouseover/semi-checked being optional. now, with msstyles, checkboxes/radiobuttons have normal, mouseover, pressed, disabled states for checked, unchecked, and semi checked boxes, as well as for radio buttons (selected and not selected). course, you mess with msstyles already, so this must just be restating the obvious to you, right?

this i think leads nicely into 'shortcuts,' or rather, things left over from windows9x/2k that still have yet to be addressed/updated. the extra states of controls being omitted, though i doubt many missed the mouseover on a checkbox till whistler started showing up around the net, the places area not getting it's own skinning options, dropdown buttons just being handled as normal toolbar buttons, toolbar menus just getting handled as toolbars, the favorites menu...it's not just that they're not skinned, but rather, that they're not skinned in a logical manner. a menu should be skinned like a menu. not like a toolbar. in windows pre-xp, yes, this is fine. but, with xp having the ability to not skin toolbar menus as toolbars, this shouldn't be that big a deal should it?

here's a pic of the header 'issue' (ie: there's no header background skinning being done, and it's not in the skin, all states have something not beige in them) that i've brought up before...

http://www.geocities.com/mephistocorugant/header.x

alright, so, where were we? ah yes...

um, addressing the 'consistent environment' while i'm thinking about it...that's the thing. windowblinds is growing and it's getting to a state where you can actually choose between msstyles or windowblinds skins and not lose anything between the two. but it's not there yet. part of that is because of consistancy. when using a windowblinds skin, the average user won't notice a difference between it and an msstyle skin (assuming that both are nice skins that skin everything they can). but, there are still enough things that seem jarring enough to remind someone 'hey, i'm using a 3rd party solution to skin this.' like the favorites menu. IE was like that up until 3.15 when it finally got skinned. the grouped taskbar menu is like that. the (at this point unskinned) tasks panel is like that. that's not even having opened a 3rd party app yet...

now, up until now i thought i'd made my assertions pretty clear as to what i was comparing. controls to controls. LOGICALLY skinning controls to logically skinning controls. you can't actually sit there and read this and look at windowblinds and then look at a comparable msstyle skin and say that they're the same and they're both doing just as much. bringing win9x/2k into this shouldn't even be thought of as fair because they can't use msstyles. it'd be like comparing a truck to a dragster in an offroad competition.

now i think we come full circle, back to where this is all stemming from. microsoft made the msstyle format in it's final (as of win xp) form to give the user a seamless feeling across windows. not across apps, across windows. i for one think they pulled this off. now, when i look at making an msstyle skin there's something that off the bat you notice. across all controls that it skins, you have a measure of control that's pretty much equal...be it scrollbar thumb, button, tab control, etc. you're given as much freedom with one as you are with the other, relatively speaking.

with windowblinds, it's a different story. it's like, captions have a lot of stuff you can do with them and the buttons on them. tons of options, open canvas really. but as you go along and get to controls that have been added in later and later in wb's life, and come to the windows xp components, it's like the amount of options tend to fluctuate and with some you can do a ton of stuff, but with others they're just an image. like, radio buttons. why can they only have transparency if they're tga's? why can't you use magic pink and have them bitmaps?

bollocks...i don't know anymore. if you wanna argue that msstyles is still not skinning controls as well and as numerous as windowblinds until you're blue in the face, go right ahead. i'll just chill here and have my views and just hope that each new version brings wb closer to replacing msstyles. maybe when longhorn comes out and wb 4 is released it'll be up there with xp's msstyles and some of longhorn's, course, then this argument will just start over again i'm sure.

just think, next time y'all go to document a control, it's not whether you're skinning it or not, but, whether you're skinning it how you should be. in msstyles there is now something to go by, a template, an ideal if you will, and a means to go about doing it in the apis therein. don't just turn a blind eye to it...as i'm sure someone once said 'even the best of people will be able to see the best in others without themselves getting in the way' but since i seem to be the only vocal member of this community that seems to be able to tell the difference between windowblinds and msstyles, maybe i'm the one at fault?

regardless, it's quarter till 10, and i've got a test to prepare for in a few hours...

meph

damnit, can't edit...add the xp taskbar quicklaunch area as another 'not yet' skinned area of windowblinds, and groupbox headers as the same for msstyles...

Mephisto, you're truly someone I can relate to - a long poster. Let me digest that and write more later on. If you lived near where I live, I'd invite you over for a beer!

Technical notes:
You *can* have normal pink transparency in radio buttons. Not sure what the problem is for you, it works fine here.

Now, as to the reasons why some things are skinned more than others, I think it's because skinners have been more interested in those things, and so have made a noise about them. That's why there's so many features for titlebar buttons - because everyone wants to do something with them. At the other end, radio buttons aren't that interesting, so they haven't been modified much. They were *also* added early, when things like mouseover weren't even considered - even putting an image on them was something. Now there's a lot of legacy skins with combo button support that can't be broken, and people are making a lot more noise about the XP features that are still to be added, and there is only so much developer time and . . .

XP had a lot of people spend a lot of time planning it. WB just happened, and was pulled together on the way. That's why some things are less complete. And they can be changed, but the simple fact is that WB, in it's current state, has been *good enough* for people on features levels. What has sold a lot of people is the recent increase in peformance. You *know* loads of people said "WB is slow, WB is a resource hog". Well, that's been changed, but to do it, some things have been left out, and older things that could do with improvement have not been improved, because they worked well enough as they were.

So yeah. Personally, I also think Brad was wrong to say 3.0 completely skinned XP, because it didn't - as .msstyles didn't. But the real problem in 3.0 (and before) was performance, and it had to be solved, and that's why it got front seat.

To summarise . . .

What you seem to be saying: "WB is fast enough. It needs to start skinning everything that .msstyles does, in a complete manner."

What Brad and I seem to be saying: "WB is now fast enough. From now on develompent will concentrate on making sure everything that wasn't skinned, is, and that any bits that have been left are fixed up."

The only bit there seems to be disagreement on is that you think performance should have been placed behind features from the 3.0 betas to 3.2. Having been on the newsgroups, and seen what was being posted, I *have* to disagree with you. Perhaps one or two people (including me) were complaining somewhat about not being able to skin X or Y. For most, the huge amount of new stuff was enough. What people were really hammering on was ".msstyles is faster than WB". And so that was what was addressed.

Hum... Must admit that having the darn menus skinned like the toolbar has been a pain in my bottom for a while. I wish they could be skinned seperatly.
Also, I wish there could be a way for the user to change the titlebar size, and therefore having the skin's titlebar graphic stetch in consequence, as XP does. Some people like thick titlebars, some people like thin ones, it would be nice if the user had the control.
Lastly, another thing I noticed that wasn't skinned. I have installed the XP power toys, among which there is a taskbar media player. It's really cool. Now, I've been wondering why it wasn't skinned by Windowblinds skins. All the default XP skins skin it, so I don't know...

But I still like Windowblinds better, simply because it gives more flexibility to the skinner.

Jut as a clarification - what I meant by "completely skins XP" is not that every control is skinned, but that all of your applications are skinned, not just "theme aware" ones.

To the aveage user, the first thing they'll notice on XP is that half their apps look like Windows 95 in the client area. Install WindowBlinds and that problem goes away.

Well, what *we* think of as "completely skins XP" is "completely skins every element of XP's UI". So that's where the problem is.

I have absolutely NO interest in msstyles if all it does is skin absolutely all of the boring old standard features of an OS....who really cares?...it's just like having Windows 3x with a different colour applied.
I see msstyles as akin to a colour change of 3x, whereas WB is like Calmira...capable of totally altering the 'feel'.
I look at the standard 'legitimate' styles as released with the XP OS and just say 'thank god for the silver one - the default looks horrid' but that's it.
As soon as possible, on goes Windowblinds, and on goes LiteSTEP and I say goodbye to the horrible Tupperware look forever.

Pedantry about states of skinning of a radio button is pointless when what a skinner really wants to do is "SOMETHING DIFFERENT"[tm].

If every skinnable object needs to stay essentially in the same place and remain the same size, well, woopee-do....what you end up with is good old WinAMP 2x, when there are the likes of Sonique, QCD, Kjofol, Coolplayer, even WMP....[for the un-initiated, they are free-form, not restricted format].

So, WinAMP is popular....but just ask what Player skinners prefer....

well, looks like we can all go home then because now we know what a "real" skinner thinks...

gimme a break

i just took a browse through the 'winxp' skins here and notice that perhaps just 15-20% of them couldn't be ported to an msstyles skin without much trouble or loss in functionality...

why's that you ask?

simple, because they don't deviate far from the standard windows control layout. sure, there are exceptions, like spirit for instance (which i really like even though it is hard to use at times with most colors being the same shade) and the floating fish in aquarium, but aside from that, there's not really much free form skinning going on with xp, or really anything that's come out in the past few months. now, these are pretty big generalizations i'm making, and i'm not denying that there's 40 different versions of luna floating around (at least), but, then again, i'm not dismissing everything as merely a recolored luna either. just because it's on the same size piece of paper doesn't make all photographs just different colors of each other, does it?

"If every skinnable object needs to stay essentially in the same place and remain the same size, well, woopee-do"

i challenge you to show me a skin that moves buttons or checkboxes or radio buttons around inside a window, no, not inside a caption bar, inside a window itself, as in physically alters the location of buttons within a dialog.

and to frogboy: since when have 3rd party apps counted as part of windows xp and therefore count toward the 'completely skins xp' quota?

to all: you're trying to argue a point that doesn't exist. at what point in time did i ever hype up either msstyles or uis skins beyond what they can do? when have i stated something that can't be easily proven by just turning on a respective windowblinds or msstyle skin? and in the cases where i have been wrong, when did i not admit that? i remember an old saying from high school " R.T.Q., A.T.Q." which stands for "read the question, answer the question"

in other words, don't continue an argument that isn't being argued...

now, i must go drink heavily and 'wash away the pain' of having crammed most of the last 24 hours for a dynamics test which no one aside from an elite 5 people in the world had any chance of passing...and there could be poker involved, but, i digress