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Blog: Aero Skinning, Modelers, and unorthodox skinning...

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Blog: Aero Skinning, Modelers, and unorthodox skinning...

from WinCustomize Forums

Has anyone noticed that the quality of WindowBlinds visual styles has improved lately? There's been some really great stuff coming from people like MikeB, Boxxi, and many others. With WindowBlinds 4.4 now out for registered/Object Desktop users, it's a perfect storm of good things for users (like me) who are really into this stuff.

One of the internal debates right now is whether to support Aero-style semi-transparencies in borders. We don't know how well it could be done without affecting performance. There's still lots of people who argue (incorrectly) that WindowBlinds is "slow" despite the fact it's faster than what's built into Windows XP.  I can guarantee that there's be some performance hit on all but the latest video cards for semi-transparent borders. It would be non-trivial to go and do this well. My personal feeling is I'd like to see shadows in WindowFX made more seamless. How many of you run with shadows on all the time? If not, why? I don't because I feel (maybe wrongly) that they slow down my computer. I think the first quest is to find a way to make shadows perfect as long as you have a high end video card that has proper drivers. That would be the proof of concept. I do agree that semi transparent window title bars and borders might be cool.  And I have no doubt lots of people would like the feature. The question is merely whether it's feasible or not.

Meanwhile, things are crazy at the office as usual. We're working on buying a building. Right now, we lease our building over in Livonia Michigan. But this Winter, we hope to migrate to a brand new building we're buying. We're very excited about it.  Once we're over there, we'll have more room to start hiring more peple.

Speaking of hiring, we're still in a bit of a world of pain in the art department. We really need a senior level 3D modeler, preferably one with some animation skills (i.e. someone with some serious experience). We have a fantasy strategy game in early development and we're really weak in the 3D modeling of organic things (trolls, orcs, elves, etc.).  So if you know anyone whose really good at modeling things (and I mean really good -- we have good modelers already but we don't have ones who are experienced enough to make convincing organic things fairly quickly) then have them email me ([email protected]).  And no, you can't work from remote (we get a lot of people saying they're happy to work with us, for lots of money, as long as they can work from home, we need someone on hand).

We're working with SkinPlant on a really cool new skin suite called Unorthodox. The idea is to create some truly unique looking skins that approach GUI design from new angles. We hope to have that done by October.  Meanwhile, Mormegil is nearly done with the Utopia icon suite. It's a sequel to his popular Orion icon suite. He's been working on Utopia for over a year now. It's a huge undertaking as there are so many icons in it and he has strived to create something both unique as well as something you'd want to use.  We're hoping that'll come out in October as well -- 2 years after Orion.

Next week, WinCustomize subscribers will be able to start having their own personal pages via the new WC2K5 technology. WC2K5 won't be done next week for subscribers, just the personal home pages. But I think a lot of it will blow people away. The amount of "stuff" there is, frankly, incredibly cool. By the end of September, the beta of WC2K5 will be ready for subscribers.  The full WC2K5 will be a pretty dramatic departure from the WinCustomize of today. It'll be a tabbed interface. Things will be context driven. So when you go to the WindowBlinds library, you'll see the most popular WindowBlinds skins and WindowBlinds authors along with the most recent discussions about WindowBlinds and WindowBlinds tutorials. That's what would appear on the right bar instead of the same stuff on every page.  From a speed point of view, things are really different. Right now, everything on WinCustomize is database drive.  But in WC2K5, there will be a lot of pages cached so that performance should be much higher. 

On Object Desktop, two new components are about to go into alpha/beta -- RightClick should show up next week and Web Explorer (think Internet Explorer with a tabbed interface and some other goodies built in). 

41,194 views 101 replies
Reply #51 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Oh yeah this wouldn't be for shadows anyway this would be to be able to add per pixel effects to the titlebar it'self.
Reply #52 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Thornz, I hear you. When something like you describe happens to me, I start closing down everything unnecessary, including Windowblinds, to which I leave the icon in the system tray for that very purpose (being able to disable it quickly).  So, IMO, it wouldn't change much if I was using an antialiased borders skin. I would just disable WB the odd times my computer starts coughing and hacking...
The reason, I'm really in favor of implementing it into WB and not just as a better WinF/WB integration is that my interest is not limited at shadows, but I dream of the day where WB can have nice, smooth edges even on od shapes.
DeskScapes - Bring your desktop background to life.
Reply #53 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Im really excited about stardock considering alpha transparencies. I think its a great idea. Id really like to see it as part of windowblinds so i dont have to buy a separate program.
Reply #54 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Transparencies in WB would be a perfect touch. I'm browsing for new aero-glass skins twice a day in the past few weeks. I wish if only WB would support that. Fingers crossed.
Reply #55 from WinCustomize Forums Top
I'm all for the Aero-look Of course there are even more possibilities than Aero with the transparency feature added, so I think not many will be against it Anyway, I hope Stardock will implement it in the near future
Reply #57 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Alpha transparencies would be a great option. Stardock can figure any thing out, "Innovation on Demand"....right?!
Reply #59 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Someone mentioned the idea of a third skin extension UIS3 to support alpha. I think this is the route to go, creating a third skin extension that supports it everywhere, including backgrounds, menus, startmenu, taskbar, etc. Aero aside, I think it would bring back the level of creative and unique skins that we saw in earlier WB skins, while still allowing skinners and users to have streamlined, fast and minimalistic skins that are found in the other extensions UIS2 and UIS1.

Though not necessarily on subject, I would like to see OD+ zoomer and tabbed dock building added to SKSPro. Though these docks are not very hard to build using Notepad, because they use very few images. Being able to see your work as you create it makes SKSPro one of the reasons I think that WB skins are easier to create than let's say DX objects and themes.
Reply #60 from WinCustomize Forums Top
In my opinion it would be nice to have Aero-style semi-transparencies in borders for WB4. I used WindowFX all the time. In my opinion the Aero-style semi-transparencies in borders should be added,aslo user who's machine aren't fast can turn the feature off.
Reply #61 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Correct me if I´m wrong but I thought the greatest feature in the beginning of WB was to bring the advanced features of XP to WIN98/95 users. Well at least that was the reason for me to get the OD-Suite. So for me the logical consequence would be to go for the new Longhorn features.Not only to emulate Longhorn but also to develop new,original styles.And as someone said above, if you don´t use a style with semi-transparent windows it won´t affect your CPU. I definitely would love to see these new features in one of the next WB releases.
Reply #62 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Please bring us semi-transparent/transparency! The performance hit is not even an issue considering the number should go down as new technologies are improved upon. I thought these issues were pretty much irrelevant. What was the performance hit for the first public release of WB? Carry on the legacy of skinning.
Reply #63 from WinCustomize Forums Top
skyguybcn:
Bringing the advanced features of XP to the Win9x serie is simply not possible due to limitations of the 9x serie it self. The 9x serie is horrible when it comes to GUI handling and there isn't possible for a third party to fix this.

And it wouldn't be worth the effort either. 98 is a six years old OS and 95 is nine! That very old in computer terms. And the target user group isn't that great anymore since computers comes with new OS (meaning XP in these days) so a computer running the 9x serie would most likely be an old one with old hardware and the advanced features would be horrible slow.
Reply #64 from WinCustomize Forums Top
I say streamline WindowFX as done with WB. Then bring the experience to WB. You don't want to introduce a new feature to WB that yet again will make people go and say it's laggy, slow and killing their CPU.

I'm using windowFX all the time, but really feel it could need some streamlining.
Reply #65 from WinCustomize Forums Top
All right then, have WB configured that when loading a skin that uses alpha blending it displays a warning message "Notice: this skin uses transparency features that may impact on system performance, especially on older cideo adapers".
About Web Explorer: Great for tabs! But please have a popup blocker too in it, don't rely on the fact that SP2 already has that feature, as a lot of us don't have SP2 and nor do they want it... Or, will Web Explorer support 3rd party IE toolbars, such as Google bar?
Reply #67 from WinCustomize Forums Top
One more vote for alpha blending support
Reply #68 from WinCustomize Forums Top
All I want to know is why do these effects work perfectly well on my 466Mhz Mac with its 16Mb AGP/Rage 128Pro video card and similar effects bring screen redraws to a craw on my 1.7Ghz PC with a Matrox G450 dualhead?

Is Quartz that much more superior to the method MS uses to draw windows? I mean, it seems that every single effect that is trying to be duplicated on the PC that works flawlessly on the Mac is sluggish. Heck, when I drag a window across an ObjectDock dock the dragging process slows down. Expecially when the dock is behind a window?!?! I'm sorry, I just don't get it.

I would use shadows and WindowFX, as it really adds to the interface, if they wern't so damn slow to redraw. Has anyone seen what OSX looks like withough shadows? Shadows are everything to OSX.

As for alpha blending. Only if it's handled by the video card and/or takes complete advantage of SMD. I don't see adding any more slow features unless common hardware can take advantage of them or someway or another bypass MS's code to get full hardware access to make these things work as expected.
Reply #69 from WinCustomize Forums Top
just my guess, and i have no idea what im talking about

i think its because of OS integration. most things properly (i stree properly) integrated into the OS and not running on top are going to run better. also, macs in many ways are a lot like game consoles. while they are hardware customizable of course, theres not near the spectrum of products availble for them. windows has to support a lot more, its not focused on something designed for it.
Reply #70 from WinCustomize Forums Top
I am not familiar with Matrox G450's capabilities but here with my GeForce2 I don't have that many redraw problems. However, a thing to think about is in OSX with quartz extreme transparency is handled by the GPU using OpenGL where in XP it's either done in software or done by the overlay portion of your video card (if your card supports hardware transparency overlays). Also GDI and GDI+ are done in software and GDI especially is no quartz extreme.
Reply #71 from WinCustomize Forums Top
It's just a different way of implementing the transparency: Quartz Extreme -> OpenGL WinXP\2k (which is an api built into the OS and apps just access it) -> video cards overly buffer. I had noticed that it can cause conflicts with things such as some video overlays (especially hardware motion compensation for DVD's which seems to me that it might actually be using the same overlay buffer as transparent things) which is what causes the flicker that sometimes happens because when I turn that off in the dvd program the flickering stops. When\if directx acceleration is added (which might have to wait until longhorn) I'm pretty sure that stuff would not happen anymore.
Reply #73 from WinCustomize Forums Top
But what about more creativity in the WindowBlinds (e.g., Start Menu) of which Frogboy spoke about and displayed some months ago?
Reply #74 from WinCustomize Forums Top
We may not have to wait till Longhorn, it seems Avalon will be available as an add-on to XP. Can't wait.  This should bring us the GUI quality and smoothness of OSX.
Reply #75 from WinCustomize Forums Top
From what I heard that probably is not going to come out soon. Probably when the longhorn betas come out at the earliest. And even then it probably won't have Aero (Glass). It would be just like Longhorn is without DCE available. To me it seems from what I've read that it's just a compatibility layer to run Longhorn programs in XP with XP looks. But I hope that is not true.