has anyone here actually MADE an msstyles skin? do y'all even know what can and can't be done with them aside from the obvious 'it can't skin menus' or 'you can't have odd shaped windows or borders bigger than x pixels'?

i mean, it's one thing to be like apple and say that 'the competition' doesn't matter because they don't have the amount of class that apple does, but it's another to have competition sitting right there and just turn a blind eye to it and not admit that there's actually some things they can do that you don't.

i'm serious, brad, make an msstyle skin. having made one back at build 2419 doesn't count. i'm talking take some time this weekend and make something, anything, just to get an idea of just what's being done with them and what goes into making them. then you'll see that, (sweeping generalization) like most microsoft products, they may be unfinished and not quite up to snuff in some areas, but in general, they're not as bad as everyone thinks they are.

i'm not trying to get on here and talk as an msstyle advocate or a uis advocate or anything like that. i'm trying to get on here and talk as a skinner. someone who's used both styles and you can easily go out and find examples of work i've done. for some odd reason, i think that this gives me some clout and maybe a hint of knowing what i'm talking about. no, i'm not the next treetog or alexandrie, but that doesn't mean that i don't know what i'm talking about.

hmm, another angle...

fact: windowblinds skins more than msstyles. true. but the reverse is also true. it depends on from what standpoint you look at it. and i'm looking from a standpoint of 'i want windowblinds to be a true replacement to msstyles.' hell, it's not like making a wb skin is much different from making an msstyle skin...

fact: windowblinds gives you more control of windowborders. true. plain and simple. BUT...

fact: msstyles give you more control over controls in general. say what you will, but this also is true. msstyles gives you 8 states per captionbutton, though windowblinds is the same here since 2 of the 8 states are usually just rehashes of 2 other ones, msstyles gives you control over what the flashing state of a taskbar button looks like, skins the grouped taskbar button menu, gives 8 states per radio button to wb's 4, 12 states per check box to wb's 4, skins spin controls, sliders, allows for not having a user pic based on settings in the skin, allows for moving of the logoff/shutdown buttons (as seen here: http://www.themexp.org/view_info.php?id=2062 though you have to futz with content margins a lot to get that going), ability to have buttons like the back button in ie be all one button, not just a button for back and a button for the drop down arrow, ability to skin the arrows on the quicklaunch bar and toolbars that you push to bring up more choices on a toolbar and on the afor mentioned drop down buttons, ability to skin the excess area of folder headers where if you stretch a folder window beyond the last header where there's no header but still a header area (follow that?) tab body backgrounds (i know it's in uis, but it's not working yet), ability to skin the 'my places' area of open/save dialogs independent of toolbar buttons (which, as far as i can tell, is what they're being skinned as now), etc.

yes, windowblinds does do some marvelous things with groupbox headers which can be fun, and caption text backgrounds, etc, but...

what it boils down to is this:

windowblinds is fast. but, to get that speed, sacrifices were made in what was skinned and how. i feel that it's time to let windowblinds unfold it's wings a bit, if you will, and start to not only skin more controls, but skin more controls as though they were different controls (as seen with the afor mentioned 'my places' area and the back button/all similar dropdown buttons and even go so far as to have toolbar menus ala internet explorer skinned as menus and not toolbars as msstyles does) yes, windowblinds does skin more controls than msstyles, but, again, the reverse is true also. stepping back and looking at the whole of the two from a strictly quantity standpoint, msstyles wins by a small margin.

spit and polish, that's what windowblinds needs now, now that speed and compatibility are mainly in check.

again, i challenge anyone here to take the weekend and make an msstyle skin and to share their thoughts and opinions after they've done this.

i guess that's about it, so, let it begin.

and brad, if you wanna talk about this in more real-time form just say so, cause i really would like to see windowblinds even up with and, subsequently surpass, msstyles in control over controls and possibly the pairs figure skating area as well...

meph