WindowBlinds 2.0 Preview!

WindowBlinds made its debut on BetaNews back in January of 1999. It was version 0.40 and there were grave doubts about whether a third party program could integrate itself into Windows and change how it looked. WindowBlinds 0.40 was slow, buggy, and a resource hog. Since then, WindowBlinds has gone through intense development adding new features and performance increases, but usability has not been enough for the mainstream user - until now. Stardock went back to the drawing board and scrapped their existing rendering engine. Using what they had learned over the past 2 years they started fresh. Read on as we preview WindowBlinds 2.0, and give you a look inside the future of Windows.

WindowBlinds: What the Heck is it?

You know Winamp? And you've probably played with the new MS Media Player. Some people have heard of Neoplanet and a few others Sonique. What do all these programs have in common? They are programs that allow you to greatly customize their appearance. Doing so is known as "skinning" and the little packages of graphics that provide those customizations are called "skins".

Over the past year and a half, a virtual cottage industry has sprung up supporting programs that permit themselves to be skinned. eFront’s Skinz.org has thousands of skins and receives millions of visitors each month. There are several other Web sites that are dedicated to serving skinners and those who enjoy having control over the look and feel of their programs and environments.

Now, imagine a program that didn't skin just a single application but Microsoft Windows itself along with every program running on it? That is where WindowBlinds comes in. You can change virtually every part of Windows to look and feel how you like. Want Windows to look like MacOS X or impress your buddies by having your Windows system look like Linux with the comforts of Windows? By downloading a skin you can make your desktop exactly how you want.

A Look Back

WindowBlinds 0.40 made its debut to much skepticism in early 1999. The program was not very stable and Stardock was doing things to Windows that no developer had done before.

But things got better and by September of 1999 when Stardock released WindowBlinds 1.0, most of the major problems were gone. It no longer caused programs to crash, it was quite stable and reasonably fast. Of course, reasonably fast is relative. For many users, it wasn't worth the price of admission. It didn't bring the system to a crawl but even on a modest skin, Windows was noticeably slower to draw itself and on Windows 98, it used considerable GDI/User resources.

Over the past year, Stardock has gradually improved WindowBlinds to where it is right now: v1.3. And with version 1.3 many of the remaining issues have been resolved. On older systems running skins that are at all complicated,
WindowBlinds can make Windows repaint somewhat slower than it would natively, but now it uses hardly any system/GDI resources. RAM usage is much smaller and it works on pretty much every program out there that doesn't already skin itself.

These improvements have greatly increased the number of users sporting WindowBlinds. Stardock estimates that there are over 3 million WindowBlinds users. Thanks to its small size (it fits onto a 1.44MB floppy disk) its very easy to get up and running, especially in a corporate environment. A few companies have even gone so far as to use WindowBlinds to create custom skins with a "company look", adding extra buttons that send users to various support sites and launch programs. Moreover, as WindowBlinds improved, developers began creating plug-ins.

So is WindowBlinds perfect? Well, not quite.

WindowBlinds 1.3 is still a little bit too slow and there are still just enough programs out there that give WindowBlinds fits with a cool new skin. And as users have pointed out, many of the skins that have been created are too radical. They might look neat in general but then have an obnoxiously loud color or half dozen buttons, which is enough to send any casual PC user running away screaming.

WindowBlinds 2.0: What's New and Cool

To address performance, Stardock went back to the drawing board, resulting in a brand new underlying engine with an object oriented design philosophy. With WindowBlinds 2.0, the user should not notice any performance difference between WindowBlinds and native Windows. The speed of your system is largely going to depend on how fancy the skin you want to run.

Probably the coolest new feature and one that will cause most people to upgrade is the dynamic coloring. Here's the idea: you just downloaded a new skin but unfortunately it is hot red in color and you like your skins to have blue title bars. With WindowBlinds 2.0 you can go into the configuration and select blue.

Another cool feature that Stardock has not really talked about are the new button controls that the 2.x series will be adding. The first one out of the gate is the new optimize button. For those who run at high resolutions, this is a very useful button. A skin that has an optimize button "optimizes" the window size when pressed. Running at 1600x1200? Pressing the optimize button resizes the given window to 800x600. So instead of being restricted to either minimizing the window or maximizing it, there are now more options. Stardock plans to add several other buttons along these lines (maximize horizontally, maximize vertically, dock, etc.). Stardock says they're investing a lot of development resources into functionality so that users will see WindowBlinds as more than just a visualization toy.

Other features in WB 2 include cleaning up loose ends in Windows that 1.x did not take care of. For instance, WB 2 now skins combo boxes, group boxes, header objects, status bars, rebars, and more.

WindowBlinds 2.0 also now has a "Simple mode" in which the skin author can specify that some of the extraneous buttons disappear when in that mode. Also for skin authors is the ability to bundle several skins in a single package, allowing the user to choose between these "compound skins".

To aid skin authors in having more control over the way Windows looks, skins now can have font objects. What this means is that the font and the color of the font and the style of the font can be controlled depending on the state it's in. For instance, the currently active push button could have Arial Bold Underline as its font and be colored white while the non-active push button is simply Arial and black. This may not seem like much at first but it really can make the GUI much more intuitive visually.

And finally, to address the problem of those programs that violate the Windows APIs, Stardock has created a new skinning format called "Basic skin format" (known to skinners as UIS1+). Skins that use this new format are not as powerful as the regular skins, but can be used on virtually any program without a problem. More about UIS1+ can be viewed here.

Stardock plans to have WindowBlinds 2.x out by the end of September or early October depending on the beta feedback. It is already available in Alpha on their Object Desktop Network.

So far, things look pretty good but we'll need to reserve judgement until it is publicly available and on millions of machines with different configurations. With five operating systems to support, (Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows NT, Windows 2000, and Windows Whistler) Stardock will have their hands fullm but for users who are tired of the way Windows looks or want to add some additional functionality to the GUI, WindowBlinds is the way to go.

Check out screenshots of WindowBlinds 2.0 in action: 1, 2, 3, 4