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 describe...

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...

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 wel...

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...

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 loca...

[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 a...

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:

Vertical taskbars. this one is a ...

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 Th...

How exactly do you create those criters? At first it may seem a tedious job but once you have all the frames, you're pretty much set.

First thing I did in my research was asking the experts. I've asked some of the skin authors and most of them uses a kind of workaround to this. The most detailed explanation I've received from one of the greatest WindowBlinds skinners - Mike Bryant:

The first thing I do is make an animated GIF. The GIF needs to be 272x60 pixels. The most important...

There was a concern by some users why SkinStudio shares a start menu with the original substyle when you create another substy;le based on it..

Basically the answer is - It's not a bug - It's a feature. It's like that by design. If you select a prefix on save then you will get another start menu as well, otherwise skinstudio will use the same stuff for 2 reasons.

1) it does not know how to name the new "xpstuff.xp".
2) it does not know whether you really want to break the connection. You ...