Skinning your Windows GUI with WindowBlinds 4.5

WindowBlinds 4.5 is out and holy cow is it cool! First off, I should probably explain to those of you not familiar with WindowBlinds what it is:

WindowBlinds is a program that enables you to completely change the look and feel of Microsoft Windows's user interface (i.e. title bars, push buttons, Start bar, scrollbars, etc.). 

Let's take a quick, step by step, journey through what that exactly means.  Below is a screenshot of the popular voice over IP program Ventrilo.

So here you have what Ventrilo looks like under Windows 2000 or if you're running classic mode in Windows XP (you control this through the display properties in Control Panel under the "Appearance" tab.

With Windows XP, you can apply a new look and feel called Windows XP Style to it:

So now you have new title bars for it. But because it's not "theme aware" (i.e. the program wasn't designed to be "skinned" most of it still looks classic.  This is what you get with the bundled "uxtheme" engine.  Uxtheme is the "skinning engine" that comes with Windows XP.  One might describe it as a sort of "WindowBlinds lite".  It can't skin theme aware programs and by default it can only really change programs that have been made to recognize it.  There are hacks that let you add more styles to it that literally patch out Microsoft's digital signing protection but that's not recommended by Microsoft.

On the other hand, there's WindowBlinds. It's Microsoft certified and has tons of features that let you really change the way Windows looks.

If you apply the Windows XP style with WindowBlinds, you get this:

Look at the push buttons and checkboxes. They're fully changed to the Windows XP look.  So if you want the Windows XP look across everything, get WindowBlinds.

Early versions of WindowBlinds were designed for Windows 95/98 which meant they had to do some..yucky things to work.  So running those early versions of WindowBlinds could slow down your computer. But then WindowBlinds 4 came out and it was designed with Windows XP in mind. And with that came all sorts of hardware acceleration and optimization that made WindowBlinds much faster.

WindowBlinds 4.4 came out in late 2004 and it introduced some new optimizations that actually made WindowBlinds noticeably faster than a system not running WindowBlinds.  So in effect, putting aside its customization features, WindowBlinds 4.4 was a Windows acceleration program.

The PC company Alienware includes WindowBlinds on all their computers to provide them with an Alienware look and feel. It also probably helps that it improves the performance of the Windows GUI while doing so.

Now there's WindowBlinds 4.5.

WindowBlinds 4.5 adds two basic new features that are both killer: Changing the color of a skin through hue/saturation shifting and per-pixel alpha blended Start menus.

Changing the colors of visual styles on the fly...

Hue/Saturation colorization. WindowBlinds had colorizing before but not like this. Before, you could apply a color to an entire skin. This worked on some skins quite well but on many skins not so well. Why? Because if you take a blue and yellow skin (For instance) and apply red to the whole thing, the entire thing looks..well yucky.

Hue shifting is different. You shift the colors of the skins rather than apply a color mask to them. This has the effect making skins look a lot more normal and interesting.

So a skin like VectorCell might look like this normally and we'll load up the Setup dialog of that Ventrilo program so you can see the dialog of a pretty busy looking window:

But with Hue and saturation shifting it could then be made to look like this:

Notice how natural it looks? It doesn't looked washed out. Even if you would never want a purple skin on your desktop, it now looks like it designed with purple in mind.

Or how about if you wanted to have it be a more vibrant blue?

You can have that too.  Or any other color you can think of. All looking as if the skin was always meant to have that.

But let's go with something harder. Something more challenging. How about some skin that has lots of colors?

Here's Faux-Toon. It has many colors. You could not colorize this with the old system because it would look very muddied with a single color grafted onto everything.

Not that we'd recommend this color combination but rather just as a demonstration of the difference between hue-shifting (a WindowBlinds 4.5 feature) and what you can imagine applying some arbitrary color to the entire thing.

Alpha Blended Start menus...

WindowBlinds 4.5 lets you now have Start menus that have per-pixel alpha blending. It's up to skinners (the artists/designers who make these cool visual styles) to create visual styles that use it.  But early indications are that this feature is going to be pretty exciting.

With per-pixel alpha blending, you can have Start menus that have semi transparent portions to them. Parts that you can partially see through.

Version 4.5 comes with one and there are others in development.

Another cool Start menu.

So many visual styles

On websites I've seen people say "all the WindowBlinds skins I see are ugly".  Well, most skins for anything aren't going to be of your taste.  Luckily, WindowBlinds 4.5 is the first version of WindowBlinds to be released since the new version of WinCustomize. It is much easier to sort through skins than the old WinCustomize.

For instance, if you want to see visual styles that are the favorites of the admins click HERE. 

Plus you have the fact that there's thousands of WindowBlinds skins out there:

So there you have it, WindowBlinds 4.5. It's available for download now!  If you have Object Desktop you'll get this automatically.  You can purchase WindowBlinds or Object Desktop here which includes WindowBlinds.