New Free Skin from Stardock Design: Solarion

Wow!  Thanks!

Love the start menu animation!
Got really confused looking for the window close button
Miss being able to resize in any direction from any corner (upper right the most)

LOVE! LOVE! LOVE! the look of the skin.  I'd buy a pack of skins in this style!  Take a look at some of the skins from the time that time forgot.  Brilliant stuff.  And this is so reminiscent of those.

Fantastic skin,I really like this a lot,reminds me a little of Intrastate by Essorant from wayback.    

This one is fantastic/great, thanks Stardock for its a free one, for now they are the two graetest with the Adament one, keep up the good work.

Great Skin, Great name too, congrats   

Too Cool thanks

It's an awesome skin, thanks alot Mike!!!!   

Plain and simple with a little gusto.

Mikey rocks!  

Loaded the skin a few times but have yet to see any animations .  (cept for the start button)

I love this one a lot! However, any Office 2007 window with the 'orb' is an issue as the orb covers the close box on the left side...any workaround to this?

It's been reported.    Niel said he was looking into that skin (and Adrenaline)

Thanks!

Thnaks Mike. Go sox!   

I was always afraid of what Master skins would do to the quality of free stuff and here's a great example. Mike's Optix master skin is fricken awesome, yet when it comes to time for the free stuff we get something that looks like a transparent version of an OS from the 80s. Yeah I know it's supposed to be retro, but the difference in quality here is obvious.

How about the free Molten skin they included with 6.0, great ideas poor execution. It probably serves as a good technical example but the textures used are ugly, the skin has a similar feeling to J.Js Xaphire (which is fricken awesome), only the difference in quality between the 2 is like light and day.

Welcome to the new Stardock model, find all the skinners with skill grab em up make people pay for their hard earned work and take a slice out of their pie. Leave lower quality stuff for free, but if anyone wants the high quality stuff they have to pay for it.(and Stardock gets their slice too of course) Of course high quality stuff will come out of the community too, but you bet if a skinner starts making consistently high quality stuff Stardock will snatch them up too.

Way back when I first bought my OD subscription, people made skins because they enjoyed doing it and enjoyed sharing with others. For the measly sum of the subscription I could have my pick of the latest and greatest skins. Stardock's master skins program is designed to ensure that if we want to have a high quality skin on our desktop we are going to have to pay for it, so now if I want to have the latest and greatest on my Desktop at all times you can easily end up spending as much if not more than your subscription fee on the skins alone.

Or spend 6 years slaving away making free skins and learning the trade and make their own.

Jeffrey, one way around this it to make your own high quality skins.   

Someone will correct if I'm wrong but I don't believe Stardock is making any money from the sale of Master Skins.

It is true that several of the outstanding skinners that were putting up their works in the libraries are now working for Stardock. Yes, getting paid for what they use to do for free. I don't think you would agree with me but that sounds like a pretty smart move on their part.

What do you do for a living Jeffrey?

What I do for a living I get paid for, what I do for a hobby I do because I enjoy it, if other people get enjoyment from my hobbies then that pleases me.

Don't get me wrong if the skinners are doing this for a living then so be it. I am very thankful to all of the wonderful skinners that have GIVEN so much to the community. However when I first joined OD many years ago their were no master skiners, only artists with passion.

I am not upset with skinners because as Philly0381 said "sounds like a smart move on their part". Stardock however is a different story, by making masters skins they have taken what people did out of passion and turned it into a business. If a skinner makes a super awesome unbeatable skin in the past it would have been released to everyone for everyone to enjoy. Since everyone loves money and if releasing this unbeatable skin as a master skin =money then of course they will release it as a master skin. Is it a good thing? A bad thing? Everyone is entitled to their opinion, all I am saying is say goodbye to the days when skins were about the art and the passion of the artist it's a business now. And this transformation was Stardock's brainchild, for better or worse.

My personal stance is that when I bought OD it was a community with passion I was buying a product, but the community was a big part of that decision. Right now WindowBlinds 6.0 does just about everything I need it to, and since I can no longer have the latest and greatest skins without paying additional fees I think I will just stick to the skins I have and enjoy. Unless Stardock pulls an unforseen rabbit out of their hat there will be no reason to ever upgrade WindowBlinds again. Perhaps I am alone in this decision, who knows... However if there are more customers like me it starts to look like Stardock shot themselves in the foot.

Well, I can only speak for myself but I fully intend to keep on making free skins also of equal quality. Personally, I think quality wise Solarion is just as good a skin as Optix, Where are you seeing lack of quality, Its fully skinned and as far as I can see bugless too. I'm not sure what your objection is.

Jeffrey,just because you don't like this skin as much as previous offerings doesn't mean it is of a lesser standard than them.Surely it just shows that it's down to personal taste and that we all like different styles of skins.


You're kidding right?
  

I really like how everyone thinks that just because a skin isnt a physical thing that they dont need to ever pay anyone for their work.

If i made wooden Ducks as a "hobby" and i stated making them for my friends, and they liked them, then i got better at making them, and they looked better and better, then i took a few of them to a flee market and sold them, would anyone say "hey you cant expect me to pay for that, its just a HOBBY, what gives you the right to ask me to PAY for that!"?

But if i spend weeks on a gadget or skin and decide it would be great to make a few $ off all my hard work, them im just an ass? Well I only have one thing to say.. If you dont like it, make your own and then you will see how HARD this stuff is. If you want o GIVE your work away thats your call, but dont ever begrudge someone trying to make some $ off of their HARD WORK.

Just because someone does something as a HOBBY doesnt mean that its not still WORK.

I love the entitlement people, I want it all, I want it for free, and if i dont get it, then ill take my toys and go.. well.. GO there isnt anyone standing in your way, there's the door.. GO.

Dissing on anyone who makes it to Master here and wants to take their YEARS of learning and growing and try to make something off that, is just lame. I will fight to the end to defend the rights of ANYONE to sell their WORKS. Hobby, no hobby, i dont give a damn, its work. And the time i spend making a gadget takes time from my family, my web design part time job, and my full time job, so i can charge whatever the hell i want for that, and if you dont see the value in it there isnt anyone forcing you to buy it.

Premium skins have been around since long before Stardock Design. All they did was put all the top talent together instead of them competing for business.

There are many other sites that have premium content and had it before Stardock Design.

but go ahead, blame Stardock for... not sure what.

If all skins were free, people would go back to complaining about having to buy the software. Stardock cannot win becuase they are a business. There will always be the "what have you done for me lately" clients.

I have clients that bought houses from me 8 years ago that call me to complain that their house needs repainting and I should be responsible for it. I tell them that when the sun burns out, I will then work it into my contracts that they will get lifetime guarantees on their paint.

and then theres the clients that... I had a rough week.

Many of the master skinners were selling work around the web before Stardock hired them.

By hiring them, Stardock has likely improved their marketability and general presence. Nothing has changed except the visibility is higher here. That's a good thing for skinning and skinners everywhere.

Now there is one place to go to get the very best skins (free and pay) and one place for new skinners to go and say "I want to make skins like that!"

Good for Stardock; Good for the skinners; and Good for the users!

bobbyhundreds, not kidding, maybe it's just temporary but right now all of the latest and greatest skins in my opinion are the master skins. There are some really good alternatives, but the master stuff has more appeal to me. I haven't used a new blind in months and that is rare for me. Even after downloading v6 I'm back to an old blind.

In my opinion and peoples will vary, Optix would be a high 9 this is a 6-7ish. I feel Optix has a much nicer feel to it, once again my opinion. Not to mention I was never into the whole retro thing. Maybe it's just one skin and I'm reading too much into it...

However the thing a lot of the people commenting here need to understand is I am a content consumer. I would be willing to bet that the majority of Windowblinds users are content consumers, not content creators. When I bought Windowblinds it was a bit like a television, I bought the TV because there was a lot of free content available I wanted to watch. Now I can continue watching the same programs that I always watched but all of the good TV programs coming out are pay per view. How the actors and TV show producers get paid is not my concern, I bought a TV because I wanted to consume the available content. I have no interest in pay per view TV. When good content stops becoming availabe my TV loses it's value. TVs lose value the TV maker loses customers. Simple.

I do not think I am entitled or due anything from anybody, whether or not people charge or do not charge doesn't affect me. What concerns me is the availability of good free content, and this should be what concerns Stardock as well. I am not blaming skinners for anything, every skinner is entitled to thanks and appreciation from everyone. The only thing I am doing here is stating the truth of how I feel about the current state of affairs as it pertains to WindowBlinds the product and content available for it.

It's not about paying people for their work, because as a content consumer my concern is whether or not there is good content available. period. I don't watch TV wondering about how the actors get paid. Stardock sells a player for what used to be free content, now the good content is not free and some people are not going to want to buy a new player. This is not my opinion, this is a business reality. Whether or not "some people" is only me or a larger number of customers is open to speculation. Stardock has a vested interest in having good content available and if the community that origanlly provided this free content is shrinking there is a number of ways Stardock can handle this from encouraging people to skin to actually hiring professional skin designers to create free content to fill the gap. If from day one the content was not free that would factor in to people's decision to purchase the product, however that is not the case and by changing that aspect they will distance some customers like myself. If Stardock is fine with that then so be it. It's their company. However if the the content consumers like myself feel that not enough good free content is available to warrent buying the next version of the program, that is the reality that Stardock has to deal with.

That's exactly what they are already doing... just beacause you don't like the skins they have released isn't their fault, the way I see it they are going above and beyond what might be logically expected of them. Like you said though, it's your opinion and your entitled to it, I don't think your going to find many who agree with you. Honestly saying that all of the good content is now gone is probably offensive to the hundreds of sinners that aren't Master skinners yet. These skinner's need to be encouraged not downtrodden.

At least he's honest.  Although mixing "the truth" and "how I feel" can be disengenoius.

I think that there are many excellent skins available for free.  I think that your standards have changed over the years and you've become spoiled by the level of skins produced by the master skinners.

Oh well.