Ah customization of Windows. It's a gradual process.  Using the popular voice over IP chat program, Ventrilo, let's take that journey with WindowBlinds 4.5.

...In the beginning there was Windows classic. And it was good. Simple, fast clean.  Then Windows XP came and it came with a skin (known as "visual styles" when you're "skinning" the entire GUI).

And so the title bars and borders were changed. And it was still good. But not complete. For only theme-aware applications can be skinned by Microsoft's msstyles run through Windows XP.

But there was Stardock, who had been skinning the GUI of operating systems for many years. They had WindowBlinds.

WindowBlinds could skin even non-theme aware programs (i.e. most programs aren't theme aware). And so it was better.  But skinning more elements of the GUI also came at a performance cost that some noticed. 

So then Stardock came out with WindowBlinds 4.x. culminating with WindowBlinds 4.4 released in 2004. And its use of hardware acceleration and other features exclusive to Windows XP make WindowBlinds not just faster than the default Windows XP style (so fast that the high performance PC company, Alienware chose to bundle WindowBlinds with their computers) but on part with the original classic Windows interface.  Users could have their cake and eat it too.

And soon WindowBlinds 4.5 will be here. It has some very key features:

Hue/Saturation colorization. WindowBlinds had colorizing before but not like this. Before, you could apply a color to an entire skin. This worked on some skins quite well but on many skins not so well. Why? Because if you take a blue and yellow skin (For instance) and apply red to the whole thing, the entire thing looks..well washed out.

Hue shifting is different. You shift the colors of the skins rather than apply a color mask to them. This has the effect making skins look a lot more normal and interesting.

So a skin like VectorCell might look like this normally and we'll load up the Setup dialog of that Ventrilo program so you can see the dialog of a pretty busy looking window:

But with Hue and saturation shifting it could then be made to look like this:

Notice how natural it looks? It doesn't looked washed out. Even if you would never want a purple skin on your desktop, it now looks like it designed with purple in mind.

Or how about if you wanted to have it be a more vibrant blue?

You can have that too.  Or any other color you can think of. All looking as if the skin was always meant to have that.

But let's go with something harder. Something more challenging. How about some skin that has lots of colors?

Here's Faux-Toon. It has many colors. You could not colorize this with the old system because it would look very muddied with a single color grafted onto everything.

Not that we'd recommend this color combination but rather just as a demonstration of the difference between hue-shifting (a WindowBlinds 4.5 feature) and what you can imagine applying some arbitrary color to the entire thing.

Plus you have the fact that there's thousands of WindowBlinds skins out there:

And once last look at this dialog using the default Windows XP msstyle:

So in other words, if you want Windows XP to look like Windows XP consistently you will want WindowBlinds.

The Second new feature of WindowBlinds 4.5 is the ability for WindowBlinds visual styles to now include special styles just for the frames of Internet Explorer / Explorer browser windows. We don't have any examples done yet so we'll have to wait to show some screenshots. But you can probably imagine what skin authors will be able to do with this.  We may expand this further so that in a given skin, skin authors can define specific frames for specific programs within a single skin if they choose.

The Third new major feature of WindowBlinds 4.5 is the ability to have per-pixel alpha channels on the Start menu itself. Those of you who like very nice Start menus can imagine the cool stuff that can be done with this.  We don't have any skins done yet that show this off (we're working on them now).

The Fourth major change in WindowBlinds 4.5 which may get into 4.5 or have to wait until a minor update is the ability to have per-pixel alpha on menus.  Many skinners have requested this for years.

The Fifth major addition to WindowBlinds 4.5 (or it may get into a subsequent update depending on time) is support for the 64bit version of Windows.

Plus, there are tons of small tweaks and changes here and there to improve performance, fix bugs found/reported, etc.

So there you have it, WindowBlinds 4.5. It should be out in the next couple of weeks.  If you have Object Desktop you'll get this automatically.  You can purchase WindowBlinds or Object Desktop here.

Longhorn may not be here yet but you can start learning about XAML now.  XAML is a new mark-up language that Microsoft is developing that allows users to easily create user interfaces.

Stardock plans to incorporate XAML into DesktopX at some point to combine its power with DesktopX's native easy of development.  In the meantime, check out this article on it.

(update) External link fixed.

Do you know why we love the computer industry? Because only in the computer industry do we get to have hard core smack downs.  It's one big industry video game where Microsoft has to fight off various "bosses" as it climbs the ladder to tougher and tougher opponents:

Microsoft vs. IBM

Microsoft vs. Netscape

Microsoft vs. AOL

and now..

Microsoft vs. Google

Each time, the opponent is tougher, more seasoned and each time the restraints on Microsoft greater.  And Google is smart.  From the very start Google has been about the smartest, most clever company I've seen on the net. Almost all their ideas are brillian.  Clever search engine. Text ads, you name it, it's all been done with incredible intelligence. 

So can Microsoft's new search engine beat it out? I have my doubts. I've been trying out MSN Search and it doesn't compare at this point.  Here's a simple search: "Brad Wardell".  On MSN Search I get some interview on a gaming site as the # 1 pick. On Google I get my blog page. So whatever algorithm Microsoft is using, it hasn't quite come together yet.

And so far, Google has been benevolent.  The power that Google has is frightening. They could flatten almost any net based business (including ours) just by changing their algorithm a bit to push us off the first page on a number of things. Even as it their use of open directory, which is incredibly outdated, is a source of frustration to us.

So what's next for Google? Check out this article on Technology Review for a very lengthy and thorough analysis...

Just because Microsoft has said it will comply immediately with a European Court judge's order to follow specified antitrust remedies doesn't mean life will be a bowl of cherries for Microsoft's partners, developers and even its competitors.

Industry watchers said they will be watching exactly how Microsoft makes good on the court-ordered removal of Windows Media Player from its Windows desktop operating system, and its publishing of communications protocols designed to make Windows better communicate with competitors' products.

Microsoft-Watch.com has a full article on the the repricussions of the EU decision to force Microsoft to pull its Media Player from the base OS. Including this quote:

"Forcing Microsoft to unbundled Windows Media Player is a bad decision for consumers," said Brad Wardell, president and CEO of Stardock Corp., a Windows software developer. "The universal availability of a capable media player as part of the OS enables software developers, consumers, and media professionals to make certain assumptions about what they can put into their software, make use of on a website, or distribute on the Internet."

Wardell said it will be crucial to see what kinds of underlying media technologies and files, rather than simply Windows Media Player itself, Microsoft unbundles from Windows.

"There's a lot of 'stuff' that Windows Media Player includes with it that developers routinely make use of to create things like inter-office radio, media streaming, etc. Developers like us put up .WMV files onto our websites as tutorials about our software because we can assume that Windows XP users have Windows Media Player," Wardell said.

Read the whole thing at Microsoft-Watch.com.

Editorial: That isn't to say that I think Microsoft should be able to toss anything they want into the OS. They are a monopoly. However, the courts need to weigh the pros and cons of these things more carefully. Having a basic ability to play music and video as part of the OS is different than throwing in anti-virus or Internet search.

Apple appears to be preparing to release a flash memory version of the iPod.  The iPod is a media player device that has historically used micro-hard drives in their devices. The typical iPod has 20 gigabytes of space on it with the mini-iPod having 4 gigabytes (that's what I have).

A flash based iPod would likely make it smaller and lighter.

Apple was also not the first to offer hard-drive-based players when it debuted the first iPod in October 2001, but it now commands the lion's share of that market. In the U.S. retail market, the iPod accounted for more than 80 percent of sales in the 12 months ended this October, according to The NPD Group. That's up from about two-thirds market share in the same period a year ago and a 40 percent share in its first year.

Read the whole thing.