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).