I know, I know what I said about skinners....

I use msstyles but not Style XP. I don't need to use a "product" to patch uxtheme.dll.

There are a handful of good msstyles floating around but I the other day while bored I did a survey of the last 100 skins submitted.

3/4ths of them are Luna with a differnet color (that is 75 of 100). You don't see that on WindowBlinds because users can recolor their own skins dynamically.

Only EIGHT were original creations, the rest were OS ports (mostly Aqua with buttons on the wrong side).

While I'm sure over time there will be better ones out there, the real question is, can msstyle attract high quality expert skinners (ala Treetog or Dangeruss or Alexandrie?). Would people of that skill be satisified with the limitations of that format? And nearly every top skin author I've known is older (i.e. over 20). And that's very bad news for anything whose claim to fame is that it doesn't cost a whopping $20 to get all the benefit out of ($20 is a lot if your only source of income is your allowance and you have to borrow your parent's credit card but to most adults, $20 IS effectively free).

But quantity wise, yea, msstyles is doing well. I'm sure in a year we'll see things like "Well there's 2500 msstyles and only 2000 WindowBlinds skins!" Even though 2000 of those skins are just Luna recolored.

Silvarado...I won't call you a 'hypocrate' or, for that matter, a 'hypocrite'....

I for one am hoping that eventually the tame colouring and blatant ripping will die out and some 'actual' talent there will be in evidence...

The Site Director of themexp (Greg), is fairly new to the skinning scene. He's trying to do the best job that he can. Themexp is easily the best place to find msstyles yet, in large part because Greg recognizes that he's new to the scene and is open to suggestions and guidance from others. It is true that very good quality msstyles are few and far between, but there are some artists doing them that are very talented, especially considering that they've only been skinning for a few months. Look back through the archives here and see what people were doing for WB in the first few months. I think you'll see a very similar lot to what you see at themexp. There are probably less than 10 truly great WB skinners in my very humble opinion. Up to this point there are 2-3 msstyle authors who I think in time will rival some of the top Wb skinners. Notice I said rival There are a few WB skinners that will never be equalled by anyone.

I've been using both WB3 and msstyles for the last few months. I think my heart will always belong to WB, but I enjoy trying new styles and seeing how the skins there are progressing in quality.

It's certainly not Greg's fault. If anything, the TGTSoft guys encourage the color stuff with StyleBuilder which makes it easy to modify Luna (or colorize it) but is a bit weaker at creating new skins.

I don't think msstyles can rival a WB skin really. It's just too limited. Withouth the ability to control the border sizes and limited title bar control, you'll never see a skin like Sage or Lunar or other cool recent ones let alone classics like Driftwood or Ampula or WBMania.

And that's really the thing. People who ARE good at skinning are likely to become frustrated with those limitations.

What's worse, I can't even say that msstyles is a good introductory for skin authors because make an msstyle skin, an original one, is a huge pain. It's a good introductory for USERS since the skins are so tame and consistent. But for skin authors?

I just went to the library and did a sort by date. Actually, WB skins WERE quite original from day 1.

On the first page was one of DAK's skins -- 3 years ago:

https://www.wincustomize.com/library/accounts/DAK/wb/dak2gray.gif

Are there any msstyles in frame design that match that? (back then WB didn't support scrollbars or many other controls so we can only compare titlebar/borders.

I like MSStyles. While not as powerful as WindowBlinds, it is faster (at least for me, unless using a UIS1 skin, which are not that common for XP at the moment). Unfortunately, as Frogboy said, there are only a handful of good themes for it at the moment. It is my belief that it is because MSStyles are comparatively young, and while we may not see the authors that we've come to respect in the WindowBlinds scene porting their skins to MSStyles just yet, as that community matures, it will develop it's own collection of highly skilled skinners. I just hope that TGT don't manage to completely decimate the scene by trying to charge $20 to patch a DLL (that's patchable quite easily and very freely by anyone).

Just my $0.02,

AJ

I used to have StyleXP on my PC around the time it first came out. I unistalled it weeks ago. I checked a post here on how to patch uxtheme.dll Here https://www.wincustomize.com/msgboardid.asp?id=27309 I used a hex editor today and could not find the address' mentioned in the post. Could it be that my uxtheme.dll is not back to the original. I did a repair with my WinXP CDRom last week so I thought it would be back to the original uxtheme.dll Someone please help, I'm starting to get worried.

Thanks

AJ, the problem isn't talent on the part of skin authors. The program eFX can do much more than what an msstyle can do. There is only so much one can do by changing bitmaps. I do expect we'll see "better" msstyles in the future but my point remains - what incentive is there for a talented skin author to spend those hours making a skin for it when they could make something for WindowBlinds (or some other future alternative) that would be easier and do more?

While some msstyles may SEEM faster, that's purely because of a particular reason - the entire XP skin engine was designed specifically for Luna. The more similar to Luna, the faster. Whereas the WIndowBlinds engine is more generalized. Though yes, UIS1 skins are faster in all cases because it's less generalized. Check out my LiquidHF upload and compare it to any visual style.

WinAmp skinning is changing bitmaps. That's how it all started and there are still those that fancy it over freeform. And constrainment can lead to very innovative designs.

Note that I still don't have XP though, so I'm merely theorising as usual.

There's a difference Craeonics - WinAmp skinning became popular because it is EASY to make a WinAmp skin.

Making an msstyle is actually very difficult to do even with StyleBuilder (I've made a couple). If WinAmp skins were just as hard to make as Windows Media Player yet were just as limited as WinAmp skins are, which would you make?

Silverado Trucker - I used a hex editor today and could not find the address' mentioned in the post. Could it be that my uxtheme.dll is not back to the original.

Someone please help, I'm starting to get worried.

you are only now starting to get worried?
at work (where both regedit and hex editors are our friends ) people start to get worried as soon as someone seriously mentions hex editing working executables, let alone OS ones

i dont have XP so cannot help directly, but all you need to do is get the crc for your file, and get someone else to do the same (using the same crc or checksum program) on their XP machine. compare the numbers, and you will soon know.