Skinning Aero!

If you have Object Desktop, you can get it now.  If not, you can purchase Object Desktop here.

IF you have Windows 7 THEN you should definitely get Object Desktop RIGHT NOW (though it’s pretty awesome on XP and Vista as well).

What a fantastic week on Impulse this week.  We had some great releases, some pre-orders go up, and we are ending out the week with are weekly Impulse Buys. 

The new releases for this week have been:

• Tropico 3
• FIFA Soccer 10
• Crysis
• ARMA 2
• The Dracula Files

Updates included:

• AI War to v2.0
• Demigod v1.19

New Pre-orders:

• Sacraboar with 25% off and early beta acccess

This weekends Impulse buys!

$19.99	$6.99	$14.99
$14.99	$14.99	$28.99

You have been hearing a lot about WindowBlinds 7 and textures lately.  We have also introduced a new UIS0 skin format, which will allow users to easily modify Aero with textures, colors, etc.  Using textures is a great way to modify a skin with a texture of your liking, or to just apply a texture to Aero for a simple and subtle change in the default user interface of Windows.

Now I want to show you how to actually do it!

First you need to have a texture image.  You can either create your own, or grab one from images searches from Bing or Google.  Just make sure the graphics are yours or have permissions if distributing them.  It’s hard to say what a good size is for a image file, but one important tip is to make sure the texture file has good seamless edges if you plan on tiling it throughout the skin.

For this tutorial I found a nice texture image of water.  I thought that would be an interesting effect.

Now open the WindowBlinds configuration, select the skin you wish to texture, and click the textures tab at the bottom.

In this window you will see you have three different areas that you can apply a texture to.  The window frame, taskbar, and start menu.  You can apply a different texture to each section, or you can use the same for all. 

Click Create new.  A new window will popup, and you can select a new image file to load, or load a previous image from the File menu.

As you can see, I loaded my water texture image and now you can use the slider to scale the image to your liking.  You can also select whether or not to tile the image by checking the box.  Once you are happy with your image, go back to the File menu and save it.  This will create your new texture and will then be visible in the texture area of WindowBlinds.

I selected the water texture for all three areas, and in the screenshots above you can see my newly created texture along side the rest of them.  All you have to do now is select it.

I have to admit this water texture came out really nice.   If you need to edit the textures or even delete them, those options are available right next to the Create buttons.  A new feature in WindowBlinds 7 will allow you to package textures in a .wba file. All you have to do is place your .texture file and image file into .zip, and rename it as an .wba file.

You should now have a good idea on how to create and apply your own textures with WindowBlinds.

www.windowblinds.net

It’s been several years since WindowBlinds has added a new skinning format.  For those of you who are techies, WindowBlinds has UIS1 and UIS2 (User Interface Specification). 

UIS2 is extremely powerful and lets users go wild with the design. 99% of skins use UIS2.  The downside is that skins are very hard to do (and even harder to do nicely) and there can be compatibility issues with programs that don’t adhere to the GUI conventions of Windows.

UIS1 is a lot less powerful but faster.  The borders and title bar are a fixed size and the title bar buttons can’t be moved. They’re a bit easier to make but still involve quite a bit of work. They have essentially perfect compatibility but most skinners don’t do UIS1 because they’re nearly as hard as UIS2 and and lack the power.

With WindowBlinds 7, a new skinning format gets introduced: UIS0.  The idea here is to make it very very easy to make skins and the skins only apply to Aero (which means for XP users this won’t apply since there’s no Aero to apply to).  Since the Aero design can’t be “touched” skinners can’t really easily hang themselves.

Don’t get me wrong, you CAN make an ugly Aero skin with UIS0.

Besides being easier to create UIS0 skins, UIS0 skins are Aero which means that any weird program that makes the assumption that Aero is running will be fine.

  vs.

The biggest goal, however is to make it a lot easier to make skins again.  Terrific skins like Aero Metal and Aero Midnight (by Vstyler for Stardock Design) are designed to look just like Aero but with metal textures or be pitch black.  It’s just as hard to make those skins (actually even harder since people are going to be comparing it to the default Aero) as any “original” skin.

Now, people who like the Windows Vista/Windows 7 default look but simply want to enhance it in some way can do so with a minimal of fuss.  Textures, colorization, and other new WindowBlinds 7 effects can be applied to Aero just like any other skin.

The beta of this is due out this week for Object Desktop users.

With ObjectDock 2.0 on the horizon, I wanted to take a fresh look back at the current version of ObjectDock Plus, as it is still an invaluable tool for any desktop.

I have been sitting here downloading images and applying them to my favorite WindowBlinds skins, just to see how they look.  The results have been fantastic, and staying true to the Fall season and Halloween, I wanted to make some “festive” textures.

You can also preview WindowBlinds 7 by becoming an Object Desktop subscriber.  Head over to www.objectdesktop.com for more info!

Windows 7 has greatly improved its own theme capabilities, which are far better than you found in Windows XP or Vista.  With Windows 7 you can now change the colors of theme, background, sounds, screensaver, etc. and even package those themes for sharing. 

I have seen some nice combinations of themes, and it’s such a far departure from the Luna days most of us should remember.  Even though the integrated Personalization options have widely grown over time, there are still limitations to be had.  If you want to truly customize your desktop, third-party software is what you will need.

Being that the Windows 7 launch is in October, it’s also very close to the release of Object Desktop 2010, which includes huge updates like WindowBlinds 7.  If you want to extend your personalization and customization needs beyond what Windows offers, this is what you want. 

With WindowBlinds 7 you have many more options and features available for Windows 7.

Some of these include:

• Advanced skinning options
• Adjustable transparency
• Textures
• Re-coloring of skins in real-time
• Changing of Explorer backgrounds
• and much more!

Take a look at my current Windows 7 desktop using a skin created by a community member of WinCustomize.com.

Here is the same desktop with a texture applied to the skin.  The customization options are nearly endless!

It’s been awhile since DesktopX got the kind of love it deserved. And with the new Object Desktop in development, it’s getting some love. 

First, DesktopX is going back to its roots – desktop eXtension.  Specifically, adding objects to the desktop that can be made to do interesting and useful things.

This will have some consequences and opportunities.

On the consequence side, we’re going to pull out features that are rarely used, hard to support, and are just generally not part of the core product.  For example, creating system trays. That was something we hacked in years ago that really shouldn’t have been in there.  In the early days when there was ObjectBar vs. DesktopX there was the desire to have these two programs be all things to all people.  In an age of Windows 2000/XP, we could get away with that.  But with XP/Vista/7, you really can’t, particularly in a world populated with the UAC where many many battles take place that users never see.

On the opportunity side, it sets up DesktopX to support new technologies like WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation). Picture being able to take an object and apply 3D effects to it even if the object itself is static.  There’s a lot of “good stuff” in Windows 7 that we want to make sure DesktopX is positioned to take advantage of.

A big area of change that most people, sadly, won’t notice (though power users might) is the under the cover work to make DesktopX not just work on Windows 7 but actually make use of the “plumbing” of Windows to do things faster, more robustly, and use less memory while doing it.

The target is to have a beta of DesktopX 4 in the next 2 weeks.

The folks over at the PC World blogs grabbed a copy of Fences from Stardock, and gave it a run through on their desktop.  The quote below sums up everything pretty well.

“It wasn't five minutes after installing this program that I realized I'll be using it for the rest of my computing life. It's that good.”

PC World

Business Hacks on Bnet.com, also has a quick video demo showing Fences in action.

See the video here.

Here’s my desktop.

Right now running very clean. Windows 7 64-bit, WindowBlinds 7 running a textured Vector-Cell skin, DeskScapes running with a texturized wallpaper, and Fences simply hiding all my desktop clutter for a nice clean desktop.