Fun with WindowBlinds 6 colors

Making your own color presets

One of the coolest new features of WindowBlinds 6 is the ability to selectively color parts of a skin. Combined this with another new WindowBlinds 6 feature - user created substyles and you have customization heaven.

For this demo, I'm going to show off a skin that hasn't been released at the time of this writing - Turbo.  Turbo is a new skin from Stardock Design that is being released exclusively for Object Desktop users.  It's not quite done yet - you will see some minor graphical glitches in the screenshots - but it will serve our purposes of what you can do with selective coloring.

First, let's look at Internet Explorer 7 on Windows Vista by default:

For a skin to be relevant, it has to look as good or better than the original. Aero looks pretty good I think but has some minor UI issues that are a matter of taste (I don't like that the address bar looks like it is part of the title bar, it might be a matter of taste but I think it harms the UI context).

Here is Turbo running Internet Explorer 7:

Turbo has a graphical glitch with the address line still but the site address and search field are clearly part of the client instead of part of the title bar. The status bar is also a lot cleaner.

But the important part and why I chose Turbo for this demo is that the skin has 3 main colors - black, red, and yellow.  In WindowBlinds 5, you could hue shift the whole skin but the results wouldn't have been desirable. In WindowBlinds 6, things are different.

Step 1: Create a substyle

WindowBlinds has supported sub-styles for a long time.  But with WindowBlinds 6, users can create their own mini sub-styles called presets that allow them to customize a particular skin and then save it as a sub-style.  So here we're going to do just that.  ON the Colours tab, create a new sub-style.

Create a new preset.

Give your preset a name.

Step 2: Turn on colorizing.

Once you've made a new preset, select the option to colorize your skin (see left side).  There is a small button in the middle that activates the selective coloring option. Once clicked, you get the advanced HSL colouring dialog.

Turn on coloring, then opt to use the selective colouring mode.

Step 3: Choose the color you want change

This can be a little tricky when you first start. The easiest way is to grab the little color picker on the right side and drag it (holding down the mouse button) onto the color you want to change.

Drag the color picker to the part of the skin whose color you want to change

The two sliders you see on the right determine which color you want to change. The second slider determines the color range -- how many similar colors do you want to include in your color changing?

And that's it.

Here are some example of it in action:

Note how the red buttons remain red. And there are areas that use other colors as well such as push buttons that have green mouseovers. In this way, users have a lot more control over the look of their skin and one skin becomes many.

For more information on WindowBlinds 6, visit www.windowblinds.net.