Having made my living, and still making it, in the world of programming/development it's hard sometimes to explain to end users why some things just don't justify the cost. Microsoft isn't changing windows to block things like winblinds, but to prevent bad programming from making them look bad. For those of you who have been using software back in the 95 up days, I can tell you that most people had little distinction between a bad program and windows falling on it's face. This was in no way helped by microsoft being excessively stingy with good tools, good documentation and support for developers...visual basic/mfc are two prime examples of how they were making tools that were hard to compete with anything microsoft made, and they caught most of the blame for crap software and crashes because those bad programs could crash the system easier than they should.
To respond to this (after a few leadership changes at microsoft) they started to rethink how they worked with the rest of the development world and how to help others make good software that ran better on windows. No, this didn't fix bad programming, but it did help those trying to make good software do it better. Unfortunately that involved some choices that didn't allow for customization of things like it used to be. How do you make aero run well on the bargain basement computer that can barely run much less run well. If you can't control what the users use to run your os, you can change the os to run better on crap computers. So our interface got ugly.
I can get what many of you want in windblinds (which was always to buggy for me), and the desire for it to go on. But if there is no money to pay the people who are writing the code that does it, then they also have to deal with cheap hardware, old os's (which no current software company wants to support long after the os maker won't), and so many different factors that it's hard to make it work well when the os doesn't give you a lot of capability of changes that you want.
Fences is by far the most beloved app they have for me, and multiplicity because I have more than one machine.
For me this is what I would like to see in the future:
multiple computer licenses, since some of us do one 2/3/4 and would like to run things like fences on all of them, even with the additional purchases of new licenses it's kind of a pain, and I can't have more than one subscription.
Maybe have deskcapes able to help improve multimonitor setups (I have 2x 4k and 2x 2k) to do more interesting things with backgrounds...or better yet keep windows from moving all over after the monitors go to sleep (fences doesn't handle that well either)
New ideas for windows tools/enhancements that make things better for those of us using it all day most days.
I think I'll stop supporting it when it lacks any value. I understand that it's impossible to keep things as they are, so making things that will improve my use of a desktop is what I am hoping for. Good tools that help me do this are always worth money to me.
