My problem with TGTSoft

When I've spoken to Tony over at TGTSoft in the past, he seems pretty reasonable. But the marketing of Style XP is just incredible misleading. A new interview of TGTSoft was justed posted at deviantART.

http://www.deviantart.com/news.php?id=6643

Here is my response to parts of it:


As Tony pointed out, we have no hostility towards each other, but the misleading statements are what really are the center of Stardock's concerns with TGTSoft.

Consider:
TGTSoft: "Since Style XP uses the native solution to skinning XP, we enjoy multiple benefits. The most important ones are no extra memory consumed, no extra CPU, and 100% application compatibility."

This is simply incorrect. As Microsoft has pointed publicly here at deviantART (Dan Shapiro himself, project manager of visual styles at Microsoft) that visual styiles are NOT compatible. Only the 3 visual styles included with XP were compatible enough (not 100% compatible, XP includes an immense exclusion list) to ship. Visual styles had so many compatibility problems that it led Microsoft to make them digitally signed. The fact is that Style XP breaks that digital signing protection and hence introduces the incompatibility that Microsoft spoke to. So to sy 100% compatibility is completely unfactual.

Secondly, visual styles use considerable memory. What does "no 'extra' memory" mean? It certainly uses more memory than using classic. And in fact, if you're using a visual style, the DLL uxtheme.dll gets attached to *every* process you run. Download a module viewer and see for yourself. Everytime you load up anything whether it be a game or notepad, if you're using a visual style, it has to load up uxtheme.dll every single time and attach that to the process. That's definitely using more memory. And by default, Style XP uses over 13 megs of memory on top of this (this can be turned off by it is on by default).

And finally, no extra CPU? I'm not sure what that means either. Since his statement was in response to why would someone use Style XP instead of WindowBlinds this would seem to imply that WindowBlinds uses extra CPU. It uses no more or less than visual styles do.


He goes on to say:
"Additional benefits include support for shellstyle.dll (skinning the left help window on Explorer)"

WindowBlinds 3.2 supports this as well without having to hack the shellstyle.dll.

"support for multiple font sizes, and support for multiple display resolutions (150dpi)."

So does WindowBlinds and this has nothing to do with Style XP. It would be like claiming that Style XP supports multiple monitors or something. XP is doing all the work.


And more:
TGTSoft: "Further, the new XP Theme APIs are supported completely. If you press the "Test" button in StyleBuilder you can see that all the parts draw correctly. This is not the case with some alternative solutions. "

Style XP doesn't support any APIs and in fact, all it effectively does is disable one of the APIs. Visual styles have nothing to do with Style XP. And again, since he's answering why use Style XP over WindowBlinds, it implies that WindowBlinds doesn't support these APIs which is most certainly does.


Now before someone reads what i've written and sees it as a "bash TGSoft" response, please bear in mind that I hold know ill will towards TGTSoft. My issue and Stardock's issue with TGTSoft is the misleading nature of their marketing.

Style XP does not do what they say and imply it does. All beta 7 does is use a mini-driver to patch out in memory the digital signing protection in Windows XP. This in turn allows you to download and use non-Microsoft signed visual styles on Windows XP. Put another way, it just makes it possible for other visual styles to show up in the appearance dialog. That's all. The latest betas come with a rather large sized visual style loader but it initself does nothing.

Hopefully some people can see why we, as developers who have worked over the past 3 years creating an actual skinning program, would object to someone who has created something that does the same thing as a 1K hex edit trying to make the two sound remotely equivalent.

Let me use an analogy, if someone wrote a patch that enabled scrollbar skinning in the shareware version of WindowBlinds, I think most people would agree that it would be inappropriate to claim that the patch is what is doing the scrollbar skinning. This is the same sort of thing here.