Originally posted on Wincustomize.com

If Stardock gave WindowBlinds version names like Microsoft did with XP and its successor, WindowBlinds 5 would probably be called “WindowBlinds Translucent” or “WindowBlinds See-Through” or… oh no… it can’t be… or can it (?) “WindowBlinds Vista”!

In the first part I’ve explained the most noticeable changes you will see in a new WindowBlinds 5 skin but to be honest it went all crazy about translucent parts. We’ve got used to the translucent start panel since 4.6 which I’ve described how to create in this article. But in WindowBlinds 5 you can make the whole taskbar translucent as well as the drop down menus, and the “Please Wait” dialog!

Here comes my skin!

Like it or not first impressions are important. For a skin, the first impression often determine whether the user will try it long enough to appreciate the qualities or reach for that “Delete This Skin” button right away. Right now you’ve really got the tools to make your skin transition smoothly onto the user’s system or make a big splash!

WB5 adds a new section that you can find in SkinStudio under “XP Shell”->”Please Wait Dialog”. The section is so straightforward there’s really not much to say about it. I just wanted to make sure you’re aware of its existence ands importance. The image now separated from the shutdown image and is no longer limited to the system dialog size. It blends nicely into the desktop and you gain the control over the text font and color! Think of it like of a movie trailer. It’s very important that it expresses the spirit of the skin and makes an excellent impression.

… with a cool taskbar…

The taskbar is probably more omnipresent on your user’s desktops than other controls you may consider crucial to your skin. It gives you a vast area to paint upon and allows for a quite a bit control over it. Now you can use that space in an even better way and you can finally make it blend nicely with the desktop wallpaper.

The effect is pretty simple to achieve. If you have read my other (previously linked) articles then you have a good idea about how translucency works. The simple Per-pixel effect has never worked on the taskbar before. WindowBlinds is always trying to be as backward-compatible as possible so not to break skins for which it might have been accidentally (or for research purposes) enabled, another switch has been enabled in section: “Taskbar”->”Taskbar Background”->”Horizontal”. The “Background Effect” attribute.  That failsafe need to be enabled on top of what you would regularly do to enable translucency. To summarize – to make the sample horizontal taskbar translucent enter the section: “Taskbar”->”Taskbar Background”->”Horizontal” and set the following attributes to their respective values:

• “Painting options”->”Transparency and translucency – Switch” as “Transparent”,
• “Painting options”->”Translucency – Switch” to “Translucency IS being used” and
• “Background Effect” to “Translucent Taskbar effect”

Needless to say the taskbar must actually be a translucent image for the effect to work :)

The first two switches are enabled for each section respectively (vertical/horizontal taskbar/gripper) but the last one (the “Background effect”) is shared among all of them and toggling it in any of the taskbar sections will toggle it for the whole taskbar.

… and a sparkling menu.

Similarly the drop down menus are now skinned in a per-pixel manner…

It’s as simple making your “Controls”->”Menus”->”Pull Down Background”-> “Pull Down Background Image” translucent and enabling the usual:

• “Painting options”->”Transparency and translucency – Switch” as “Transparent”,
• “Painting options”->”Translucency – Switch” to “Translucency IS being used” and

attributes in the “Controls”->”Menus”->”Pull Down Background” section. Such menus will automatically become translucent in the new WindowBlinds version.

Similarly to what has been described in this article the new menus may have the shape that does not look good with the regular menus shadow that is simply square. So if your menu is of some irregular shape or simply do the shadow blending itself you can disable the system shadows with the “Hide Shadows” attribute in the same section. Also for the feature to work you should check to make sure that the “Flat menus – disables skinning” attribute is disabled. This will especially be the case with MSStyles converted to WindowBlinds skins.

One of the features that generated a lot of excitement in the comments of the first part of the series was the ability to define a reflection map for the window frames. The cool news is that the drop down menus will allow for the same features to work on them. One can only imagine what cool effects the skinners could make with it. Suffice to say the menu can look different depending on which part of the screen it’s open on.

The drop down menu section for the feature is located in “Controls”->”Menus”->”Pull Down Background”->”Pull Down Back – Reflection” in SkinStudio.

WindowBlinds 5 is one of the most exciting releases so far. The numerous translucency additions allow skinners to create smoother, more visually appealing skins. New features like the “progress flash” and the default button fading make them more dynamic and interactive.

Originally posted on Wincustomize.com

One of the coolest features of WindowBlinds 5 is the possibility to define a translucent frames in your skin. This means a lot of things and a lot of new possibilities. Your windows can drop shadows, glow but most of all you don’t have to look at those jaggies if your skin features rounded corners in them. The level of excitement can probably be shown by the fact that it does not have even shown in the public beta, yet it already has artists creating artwork advocating it. and a number of authors creating a mock-ups of the skins they intend to create. I have to admit I do not recall being contacted so much about any previous version of WindowBlinds and any other version that generated such passion among even the MSStyles users.

The new window frames blend nicely into the current feature set of WB.

The window part is divided into 5 parts, one for each side: top, bottom, left and right like in the following picture:

If you look at the picture carefully you’ll notice that unlike before the top and bottom part of the frame goes from the very left to the very right of the window. Meaning that unlike previously the corners belong to the horizontal images rather that vertical. I must say I like that change a lot as it’s much more natural. The frames layout inside the images have remained the same. The vertical images (left and right) contain 2 frames side by side horizontally. The first frame belongs to the active state of a window while the second one belongs to the inactive state. Similarly the Horizontal images (top and bottom) has 2 frames placed on top of each other. The upper one is the active state, while the inactive one is placed on the bottom.

Should you be reading it carefully you have probably noticed that I’ve said 5 but only mentioned 4, that is because the 5th one is the maximized caption

The image is formatted just like the regular caption image – 2 frames on top of each other. The images in all of the frames MUST be 32-bit TGA-s which SkinStudio can create for you from PNG images or even allow you to edit like described in one of my previous articles.

Now what about the buttons?

The per pixel buttons are a bit less flexible on those new borders than they are on the regular windows borders, but the good news is that they are MUCH, MUCH easier to understand and test! Currently WindowBlinds allows you to define 5 buttons: minimize, maximize & restore, close and a special close button for the frames that cannot be maximized or minimized (basically those Dialog frames like Display properties.

The frames in the image  are in the following order:

• Normal
• Mouse Over
• Pressed
• Disabled
• Inactive
• Inactive Mouse Over
• Inactive Pressed
• Inactive Disabled

And although not all of them may always be used the image can look like this: 

The buttons are in their respective sections conveniently places under the “Window Borders – Per-Pixel”->”Buttons” section. there is currently no way to define additional buttons and the buttons should use the same 32-bit TGA format as the frames.

Now SkinStudio 5 gives you a way to test those images by means of 4 new sub-previews added to the main preview.

Just like any other preview – clicking on an image will take you to its respective section. SkinStudio also allows you to reposition the buttons on the preview by dragging and dropping them in the places of your choice. There is a limit to how the buttons are placed currently – they have to be aligned to the top right corner and they have to be positioned in the window caption area, With an exception of the system icon which is aligned to the top-left corner of its window. You should be aware however that each button has 2 coordinates, one for when the window is maximized and the other for the non-maximized version of the window.

Cool! So I won’t ever have to create those regular borders, right? Wrong.

Unfortunately WindowBlinds still requires you to define the regular borders. Most users will not see them or just not too often, but it’s just like that vertical taskbar which is supposedly used only by me and probably the other freak at Microsoft that actually designed it :). WindowBlinds requires those frames for 2 situations:

1. MDI Windows – the applications like SkinStudio that allow you to open multiple documents (skins) at once. Those will use the old frames when the document inside is not maximized and therefore requires the app to paint its frame.
2. Older systems that WindowBlinds detects they cannot support it due to the lack of support on the driver’s side.

The good news is that you are WindowBlinds longer constrained on the per pixel frames to the size of the caption height – system metrics. You know… the error SkinStudio reported when you had the value of  Section: “Window Borders”->   Attribute: “Top Image”->”Caption Height” defined to a different height that the caption image height. You only should check that the maximized per-pixel caption does not collide with it as WindowBlinds will then crop the image.

Window caption text

All the caption text definitions are stored withing the definition of the caption image, that is the Section: “Window Borders – PerPixel”->”Caption”->   Attribute: “Text Settings”. You can define the text font there as well as it’s placement and color. You can shift if vertically and horizontally by means of: Section: “Window Borders – PerPixel”->”Caption”->   Attribute: “Content Margins”.

Other than the imperative to have TGA’s as the images on those new sections they are pretty much a standard WindowBlinds sections like for push buttons and such.

What is the reflection map?

Reflection map is a new concept that allows the skinner to have a kind of watermark that does not belong to a particular window but adds a nice feeling that binds a number of windows together, creating a smooth desktop-wide feel. I’ve added to Mike‘s skin this reflection map (the preview shows it rescaled to 50% of its size).

the image is indeed all white and the gray areas are just translucent background that you can see through the image.

Now if you apply the image (remember to turn the translucent and transparent bits on) the sample reflection will look like this.

Now that feature is liable to make things paint slower. So use it with caution and use it only if you really have something that you can only express that way.

Originally posted on Wincustomize.com

I find a lot of users having problems with how fonts are defined in a WindowBlinds skin. It’s quite simple once you understand it how it’s done.

WindowBlinds bases on the premise that most of the skins use just a small number of font variants but use them in a number of places, meaning that one font setting will be used in a number of places like a push button, a tab, a status bar.

A font setting in SkinStudio is called “font preset” and is a set of font name, size and formatting as well as its shadow settings. When you think of it in the terms of any word processor a font setting is not different from “styles” used e.g. in Microsoft Word. And they are equally as useful! in contrast to MSStyles where you define the font for every control or its sub style in WindowBlinds you only define it a few times and then use them in multiple places.

What’s better… if you decide to change the font in a style, do it only once for the style and WB will change it everywhere the font is used! Let me show you how it’s working on a sample skin for a push button.

Every control section has a font setting (at least one) in most cases grouped in the “Fonts” subgroup in its section section.

selection one of the attributes in the group allows you to select one of the preselected fonts from the bottom combo box as shown in the above picture. Now what if you want to edit the preset and change it?

You can simply press the “Edit this font” button as in this figure:

and SkinStudio will take you to the appropriate section.

But this will change all the elements that use the preset! So if you only want to change it in this one situation or only this one control, you need to create a new preset. You can do this by either pressing the “Add new font” that will create a new default “Arial” font preset or you can choose the “Duplicate this font” that will create a new font preset identical to the one that is currently selected. Obviously you will choose the second option if you want to make the font slightly different, e.g. bold-ed for pressed state or slightly bigger or smaller. Both options will also automatically assign the newly created font preset to your selected control/attribute.

One nice thing which is probably not known by even some advanced artists is that WB will try to be smart if you won’t assign all of the fonts. For instance you can assign only the Normal font and WB will use that for all states. Now if you choose to assign another font for pressed state you only define this new state and WB will use the “pressed font” for pressed state and the “normal font” for all the rest. the fonts marked as (WB 3x) are only there for compatibility with already discontinued WindowBlinds 3 versions as some skins from the old days still use them, but there is no need to define those.

Now that you have a new preset defined it would be a good idea to modify it to your liking. If you select the attribute using the said font preset and press the “Edit this font” button SkinStudio will take you straight to the font.

Now if you have the “Font – face” attribute selected – SkinStudio will provide you with a convenient font editor in the lower panel. It’s a good idea to define the “Font name” attribute to something that is descriptive for you. It’s your “style name” speaking in the MS Office nomenclature again and it will be displayed in the combo box while you’ll be selecting the presets for your controls.

You may wish to explore and experiment the “Shadow” subsection as a homework :)

There are more fonts to WindowBlinds that are not defined in this very way like titlebar fonts. Those are defined in their respective sections.

The other type of fonts are the system fonts. Those are the fonts that you can define for the “classic” look in the Display Properties as you’ve been able to do since Windows 95.

WindowBlinds allows you to define those fonts in the skin as well in a sepearta place although in a very similar way.

The skin can define all 6 system fonts in the same way. The presets are defined in the same way although they do not share the same preseyts pool as the regular fonts preset.but rather attach their sections below the “Miscellaneous”->”Fonts for classic widgets” section.

Now as I have suggested in one of my previous articles it’s best to define the font size in negative values for the size of those fonts:

If you use the classic widget fonts referenced from section “Miscellaneous”->”Fonts for classic widgets” and defined as subsections to the section, make sure you specify the font sizes in negative values. Should you fail to do this, all kind of bad things may happen. Firefox will look bad. Outlook 2003 will most probably have problems and applications are liable to have some of their fonts blown out of the proportion.

But as we’ve investigated with danilloOC, probably the best idea would be not to define them at all as they tend to cause problems with some cross platform apps like OpenOffice or Firefox which does not seem to know how to handle the Windows fonts properly. Your experiences may be different though or the application may have been improved since then, but be sure to check it out before you publish your skin.

Originally posted  on Wincustomize.com

It all started with another brain-freeze today. I just couldn’t find a section that contained the File Dialog places bar images. You know the bar on the left on the File->Save and File->Open dialogs? I bet you’ve been cursing more than once searching for a section like that. SkinStudio will help you with searching for a section if you know it’s UIS name or its part AND if such section actually exist. But in my case it didn’t.

Wouldn’t it be great if I could just lookup the section by it’s name or a part of it?

So I’ve added a tool button like you can see on the image below.

Press this button (or press Ctrl+F while the tree view is focused) and you’re getting the familiar “Find” dialog.

Enter the section name or a part of it and press the “Fine Next” button.

There you are… Where have you been? I’ve been so worried!

It will also work if there is more than one section matching, in which case SkinStudio will iterate through the sections when you press the “Find Next” button consecutively.

The feature will be introduced in SkinStudio 5 Beta, soon to be made available on Object Desktop.

Originally posted on Wincustomize.com

Little I knew that I will be involved in it, when I was posting a while ago on Neowin and WinMatrix about the cool Warcraft skins available on Wincustomize. Blizzard is offering a World of Warcraft suite now for download on their  US and European pages pages and upon their request we needed to swiftly modify the Apocalypse‘s great World_of_Warcraft skin to meet Blizzard‘s request to match the game GUI more closely. I was assigned to the task so I went swiftly to the local store with the perfect excuse to get myself a new toy!

- Honey, but I need it for work…
- Sure you do!
- but really, darling… look…

… so I started hacking the game files to get some artwork out of it. As it appears there’s a lot of people looting the game resources than one could expect… a bi-product of it you can find in my previous article here.

But to the point….

Out of the game files I got some cool graphics, now I’m not really good with with design but equipped with some original artwork I can be pretty dangerous. So I got some artwork out of the game and started cutting and pasting this auction window:

as you can notice the frame drops a nice shadow and I wanted to reflect that in the skin. To make the long story short I ended up with  this design:

you may have noticed that I have made the right panel translucent as well, hey! if WindowBlinds can do it, why not?

Now it came the time to cut the images into their respective sections. After the process common to all XP enabled styles, the only difference so far is that I used TGAs (PNGs actually and then SkinStudio did the conversion to TGA for me automatically) in the images instead of the usual bitmaps. Let’s try it now…

OK, not quite what we hoped for, right? This is because WindowBlinds didn’t realize we have used translucent images and simply painted them as if they were binary transparent. so now for every element of the panel we need to enable translucency. This is done by clicking on each of the elements in the preview and selecting the “Translucency” check box in the lower right corner of the SkinStudio area like this:

OK so it’s still not completely right. This is still the transparency we could have get from the beginning since WindowBlinds started supporting Windows XP. If you check the following screen-shot you will notice that the shadow in the bottom and left of the panel is solid gray instead of the nice shadow in my Photoshop screen-shot.

There is a nice shadow on the right, but it’s the regular Windows shadow. In World of Warcraft the light is dropped from the top/right corner co the shadow drops to the bottom.left and that’s the effect we’re trying to have. Also the right panel is not translucent, so that’s unacceptable. And Actually this is the point when WindowBlinds magic really begins. Let’s tell WindowBlinds that we REALLY, REALLY want the start panel to be translucent. You can do this by setting the “Start Panel Effects” Attribute to “normal per pixel alpha” for every element of the start panel:

• Section: “Start Panel”->”User Pane”->   Attribute: “Start panel effects”
• Section: “Start Panel”->”Programs List”->   Attribute: “Start panel effects”
• Section: “Start Panel”->”More Programs Panel”->”Background”->   Attribute: “Start panel effects”
• Section: “Start Panel”->”Places List”->   Attribute: “Start panel effects”
• Section: “Start Panel”->”Bottom Bar”->   Attribute: “Start panel effects”

So we’re set now right?

WRONG! Due to how WindowBlinds actually processes the Start Panel translucency windows added a shadow on the right of the panel, check out the image once again, there is a shadow on the right of the start panel, some 10 pixels right of it. Once you’ll notice it’s it’s quite annoying! Let’s get rid of it…that’s a pretty simple task. All you need to do is set the following attribute to “Enabled”:

• Section: “Start Panel”->”Bottom Bar”->   Attribute: “Start panel effects”

And here’s the new Start Panel in it’s full glory:

http://www.skinstudio.net/blog_bin/startpanel_trans/blog_startpanel_trans_6.jpg

Originally posted on Wincustomize.com

[Updated 11 May 2005] Read at the end of the article.

I’ve been on a quest to improve a skin today and to do so I needed to extract a big archive in a proprietary and not widely supported format and get the images out of it and into the skin. Turned out the first part was not as bad as I expected as I’ve found some tools on the net to do this and Kris helped with the tool to convert the images in the proprietary format into TGA’s. Now here’s where the pain begun.

I needed to have my alpha channel kept in the files but I also wanted to process the files before making them into the skin.

Turns out Adobe still haven’t got their TGA support fixed (which was why I added the quasi-PNG-support to SkinStudio in the first place). If you’re not familiar with the problem, Ive wrote an article about it  before and it’s available here. As you can read here Adobe actually considers the current one a proper behaviour and the one that we enjoyed in Photoshop 7.0 is considered an “incompatibility with some existing workflows”. I’ve tried a number of other apps including IrfanView, xnView and SageThumbs but they just couldn’t chew it. So before I’ve lost what was left of my nails, I’ve decided to write a little Applet that turns 32-bit images (be those TGA-s or BMP-s) to PNG-s so that I can actually do something with them before making them into a skin.

the applet is available here

But because a lot of skinners have troubles going the other way, and it was only like a few lines of code, I’ve also made one for the other format. This one takes any 32-bit BMP or PNG and turns it into a TGA.

and you can get it here.

[Updated 11 May 2005] It could get confusing for others just like it got for me, so I’ve integrated the 2 apps and added saving to 32-bit bitmaps. I have also added the option to include or ignore images that are not 32-bit.

Now this updated applet is available here.

Have fun, and make the cool skin coming!

Originally posted on Wincustomize.com

Browsing the WindowBlinds skins on Wincustomize and applying them is a source of a lot of joy, but there’s also a drop of frustration. There are some common problems with the skins that skinners notoriously forget to check for. Perhaps my working environment is not typical but since you’ve went all the way to create a skin it’s relatively easy to make it a perfect skin for everyone. So here are the 10 things I find most common to be wrong with a lot of skins:

1. Vertical taskbars. this one is a source of a lot of grief for me. I use 2 monitors, which results in a very wide desktop area, so it’s logical for me to use the vertical taskbar. And I do use it. I must say that it’s the most common for Both WindowBlinds and MSStyles not to include a customized Vertical Taskbar and leaving it in Luna Blue instead.


2. Make sure your horizontal taskbar does not have problems when it’s located on top of the screen or when user resizes it to more than one row of task buttons. If I use the horizontal taskbar (for example when a skin does not provide a vertical one) I always have it resized to at least 4 rows of tasks. Being the developer I tend to have a teen up to 30 windows open at once for testing various aspects, browsing sites with code and helpful tips and what not. 1 row of tasks in NOT enough.


3. Making dark skins is tricky on Windows. A lot of apps are not ready at all for dark skins they hard-code colors or use the classic ones for a lot of things: Internet Explorer for example always uses only the classic color for text on buttons. No. it is not sufficient that your dark skin looks good outside Internet Explore, if it makes IE forms unusable it’s not going to be used by the majority of users. IE uses the color defined in Section: “Miscellaneous”->”Colors” in Attribute: “3D Controls”->”Text – System Button”. If you make the skin have dark buttons, make sure this color is readable on Web forms or you’ll run into this:
   
   
   


4. Make sure you fix the colors on the Desktop context menu, the “New” item sub menu and you won’t have problems with custom drawn menus. On this menu Microsoft pretty much violated it’s own guidelines of how menus should be implemented (which a lot of other apps do as well – including one menu in SkinStudio). If you do not make sure the following hint worked in your skin, this menu is liable to look bad.
   
   
   
   The text should be black on the olive green, but instead it has the light outline. the colors responsible for the outlines in your skin are:
   




• Section: “Miscellaneous”->”Colors” Attribute: “Window”->”Background – Window” for the regular non highlighted menu items. (this is what makes the menu in this very skin look bad). Update! I have just recentlydiscovered that this color is overriden by the: Section: “Miscellaneous”->”Colors”->   Attribute: “Menus”->”Background – Menu” which is much better choice as it is liable to interfere with much less places in windows.
  


• Section: “Miscellaneous”->”Colors” Attribute: “Selections”->”Background – Highlighted” for highlighted text outline (which in this skin is not visible since it’s defined as orange – which is very good)
  


5. Some people use task grouping. It’s the first thing people on large screens tend to turn off. I’m sure I don’t use it and the graphic designers tend to have big screens as well, but people on notebooks with small screens may indeed find it useful. So make sure you turn on the attribute grouing on for a while before uploading your skin. Launch a few Explorer windows with Win+E to make sure you have something grouped and check out the fonts and colors on the arrow and the grouped menu. We tend to see some real problems with a lot of skins on the menu. As I understand people simply do not use this feature and forget about it.
   


6. Make sure yous skin looks good with re-sizable and not re-sizable taskbar. this error is not nearly as common as the previous ones built it just like the one with taskbar using more than one row of buttons draws from the assumption that people will use your skin the same way you do. They don’t.
   


7. If you use the classic widget fonts referenced from section “Miscellaneous”->”Fonts for classic widgets” and defined as subsections to the section, make sure you specify the font sizes in negative values. Should you fail to do this, all kind of bad things may happen. Firefox will look bad. Outlook 2003 will most probably have problems and applications are liable to have some of their fonts blown out of the proportion.
   


8. If you use non typical fonts, you have a mechanism for WindowBlinds to temporally install those fonts for you. Section: “Miscellaneous”->”Fonts to Install” is the place where you can specify the fonts you want to have installed. If you do not reference them from there, Window will try to substitute the fonts with something it has in stock which is mostly not what you intended.
   


9. A lot of users use Firefox or Mozilla these days. Since Firefox GUI toolbox (XUL) look and feel is defined with CSS, it’s only aware of the classic colors. Just like IE, you need to make sure they all play nicely together. You cannot make sure it will look nicely with all Firefox skins but you should at least try the “Default” one.
   


10. Minimized Window caption and its buttons defined as subsections to “Minimized Window Caption” are often omitted by skinners since they do not see the appliance for them, but they actually are used. The Restore, close and Maximize are quite obvious as they are used by all MDI apps (like SkinStudio – when you minimize the Skin document from the menu bar) on minimized windows. But applications from Adobe and a few other vendors are actually using them for custom painted buttons. Photoshop for instance uses the minimize button for all of its palette windows.

this my no means exhausts the list of skin bugs, but those the things I find most commonly wrong with the WindowBlinds skins. To be honest most of the tips also concern the MSStyles I tend to convert a lot. Of course they do not have their menus skinnable and do not have a way to auto install fonts and SkinStudio auto converts classic fonts to negative values during conversion but it does not really make the things much better better, if anything – more limited.

If you find any of the problems in your skins the fix are in most cases at the reach of your hand. Should you find none of the problems in them, your nick is probably treetog, MikeB314, danilloOc or VoodooFreak ;)

Originally posted on Wincustomize.com

Implementing FireFox support in SkinStudio and having to calculate everyting carefully in the process I got pretty tired of being unable to tell how wide something is or having to run a separate app for it. Is there one actually? I guess there is… perhaps even skinnable. But being where I am – I wanted it integrated and easy to use for myself and for every skiner. available instantaneously. Seamlessly integrated into Skinstudio. (This will be available in the next SkinStudio release),

So here’s my attempt at counting pixels.

You probably already used Skinstudio zooming tool, and you’ve noticed that apart from magnifying the screen it also tells you the color of a pixel under the cursor.

now if you press the Ctrl key it will start to measure whatever you have highlighted

As you can see – additionally to the RGB values, now you also have the “Width” and “Height” values. Now, while still having the Ctrl key pressed, let me move the cursor down and right a bit…

as you can see, the Width and Height values show the difference between what was the mouse position when you pressed the “Ctrl” key and what it is now. The size is measured as long as you hol the “Ctrl:” button pressed.

Originally posted on Wincustomize.com

WindowBlinds 4.5 introduced two new cool tricks for window frames –

• IE/Explorer special shell frames, and
  
• random frames.

The two features are mutually exclusive, meaning that if you use random frames you cannot specify the special frames for the shell windows.
First of all – both features are only available in the UIS2 skins (Advanced WindowBlinds skinning format).

Now let me explain how you can use/access the features in SkinStudio and what exactly do they do:

1) Shell windows

Those are the system windows that you browse/explore your computer and the Internet with. SkinStudio added a special section for referencing them placed in the tree in this node: “Window Borders”->”Frames for Shell Windows”. The section defines two attributes:

• “Explorer Active Windows”
  
• “Explorer Inactive Windows”

The names are pretty self explanatory. The attributes define the indexes of the states used for the active and inactive shell windows. But what you may find confusing is that the index is zero based – meaning that the first state in your frame set has an index of 0. If you define the attributes WindowBlinds will choose those states for shell windows instead of it’s regular choice being – the first state for active and the last one for inactive windows.

What you need to do is simply make your window frame images contain two more states for the shell windows so instead of 2 or 3 (if you define the disabled state) images you would include normally – you put 4 or 5 states in there. Of course the states layout setup cannot violate the 3 canonic WindowBlinds rules which are:

• first state is for the regular active window.
  
• last state is for the inactive window (or the second from the end if disabled state is used).
  
• and if you have the “Disabled frame state” enabled in the skin, that is you have this attribute:
  Section: “Window Borders”-> Attribute: “Miscellaneous options”->”Image State – Disabled Frame”
  set to “Enabled”, then the “disabled state” must be added as the last state in the strip. By the way – if you never realized this before – disabled frames are used when a window is showing a modal dialog that makes this window inaccessible for the user. You can find when a window is disabled if Windows will *ding* at you when you try to click such disabled window.

So this forces us to use a following states layout:

1. Active window
   
2. Active shell window (this is the state that you need to point at in the “Explorer Active Windows” attribute – in this case you would need to set it to “1″ since the index is zero based).
   
3. Inactive shell window (this is the state that you need to point at in the “Explorer Inactive Windows” attribute – in this case you would need to set it to “1″ since the index is zero based).
   
4. Inactive window state
   
5. Disabled window state (if the disabled state visualization is enabled).

That’s all that it is to it. Of course you need to equip all the window edge images with the equally same states number as that’s a fundamental WindowBlinds requirement.

2) Random frames

Random frames is a feature which I personally find much cooler than the shell windows skinning. This feature actually changes the windows states layout established so long ago. You enable the feature by flipping the:

Section: “Window Borders”-> Attribute: “Miscellaneous options”->”Random frame selection”

from “Disable random borders” to “Enable random borders”.

By doing so you allow WindowBlinds to randomize the available frames looks for newly created windows. If this option is enabled, the skin must provide more than one pair of active/inactive states for windows borders. The borders must be organized in sets of pairs of active and inactive states following each other like that:

1. active state 1
   
2. inactive state 1
   
3. active state 2
   
4. inactive state 2
   
5. …
   
6. …
   
7. active state X
   
8. inactive state X

Also like previously – exactly the same number of states needs to be supplied for all edges of the window frames. Also there is another limitation here – all states must be of the same shape, which means that if you put any pink area on the frame in the active1 state – it needs to be in the exact same shape in all the active states as well and unless you enabled Dynamic frames (Section: “Window Borders”-> Attribute: “Miscellaneous options”->”Dynamic Frame Image Shape”) – it needs to be in all of the disabled states too.

WindowBlinds will choose among the pairs on a random basis during creation of each window/app.

Now if you define say… 20 framesets – the user will have a few hours of fun and surprises with the skin. I can see how this is a big job to define that number of frames, but isn’t a skin an enormous effort already? Now if you add just a little bit to it making it exceptional – don’t we all agree that it’s what lies in the heart of customization? I can see how this could be a true favorite feature (on top of the translucent start menus) in the coming months

Originally posted on Wincustomize.com

Very important: Recoloring/converting or altering icons or skins does not change the original author’s copyright, nor does it make such skin yours! If you recolor/convert or alter a skin or icon that has not been made by yourself you may not upload or share the modified skin or icon without the original author’s permission.

Working on enhancing the porting filter in the most recent months I’ve been working with various msstyles authors (and a lot of them either ported or allowed to port their msstyles). And almost always the first question that arises is – “What’s the point? I can use Windows XP built in theming after all. What does it give me to release my style as a WindowBlinds skin?”

1. WindowBlinds skins non-theme aware programs so all of Windows would have the style, not just theme aware ones.
   
2. Users can mix and match toolbar and progress animations with it (yes there are other ways to do this but nothing as easy as WindowBlinds).
   
3. You can change its color easily on the fly.
   
4. For most people, it’ll run significantly (i.e. noticeably) faster. Hardware acceleration!
   
5. You can assign other mouse button operations to the title bar.
   
6. You can easily add buttons that enhance the theme’s functionality.
   
7. You can apply advanced recoloring to it with SkinStudio.
   
8. With minimum effort you can enable dropdown menus skinning after conversion.
   
9. Setting SkinStudio use “maximum quality” option during conversion will make your menu bar skinned as it was a toolbar.
   
10. Ability to integrate the skin with the font (the font is installed automatically as the skin is used). It comes with the skin in one WBA (WindowBlinds zipped skin) so there is no risk the theme will look weird if user forgets to install the font or just skip reading the readme where you advise him/her to.
    
11. Ability to associate the skin with the toolbar icons so that they are automatically applied once you start using the skin. Same with Animations if the msstyles contains them as well. No need for them to use Additional programs as Y’Z toolbar or replace system files.
    
12. User can set the Visual Style to be used for a single app while having another one fot the whole system.
    
13. Users do not have to hack the dlls vital to their system systems functioning. This may not be important for you, but believe me it has raised concern more than once among our customers. That was why actually we decided to make the MSStyles converter. Our customers liked some of the msstyles but didn’t want to hack their system files.
    
14. On my ssytem (though you may have either confirm or an feel differently) WindowBlinds is more stable than Msstyles. Actually changing msstyles (And I’m changing both of them a lot) kills an application running on my system at least once a 4 changes of a theme. Will it be Firefox(a lot), my Bluetooth stack (more seldom) or my programing IDE(really, really popular at dying). It practically does not happen to WindowBlinds any longer. And being an msstyles author you most probably know very well what I’m talking about.
    
15. There is no way you could make an Msstyle that a company like Nintendo, nVidia (or here), Marvel, ATI or Microsoft (or here) would pay you for. Those are just the few themes off a top of my head, but WindowBlinds skinners are making paid themes on a daily basis. The reason why you cannot sell your MSstyle to them is that there is no way for the user to apply the theme in a legitimate way. No – a hack is not legitimate even if some companies sell them). I’m sure you’re in it for fun and not for money. That’s cool, but making a few bucks now and then doing what you love is really nice, isn’t it?

That’s just 15 reasons that I think of first when someone asks me “Why WindowBlinds“. If you’re still undecided just download SkinStudio and you should be able to just double click on your .msstyles file (make sure you unzip it to a directory first) and have it imported in. SkinStudio is a free download that will not expire on you and will allow you to convert msstyles to WindowBlinds and edit your themes indefinitely!

Be aware that even though it’s still not perfect (especially the Free version is rather old) there will be a new SkinStudio release right after the New Year (Jan 2005) that will significantly improve upon what it does now. Object Desktop subscribers may already enjoy some of the improvements. More to come!

I used elements of Brad’s post from Neowin in my article – thanks for the inspiration Brad.