Brad Wardell is President & CEO of Stardock Corporation. A small (couple dozen employees) Midwestern software company that develops Object Desktop, a desktop enhancement suite, and several games such as The Corporate Machine, Galactic Civilizations, Stellar Frontier, and more.

The best known program of the Object Desktop suite is called WindowBlinds, a program with an installed base of over 4 million users. But recently, as Stardock has moved towards the final release of WindowBlinds version 3, it has faced a new challenge from Windows XP itself. WindowBlinds 3 extends Windows XP to support UIS skins (UIS is the skin language supported by WindowBlinds, ICQPlus 3.1, MediaJukebox, and several other companies licensed to use UIS). But with a new program called Style XP, Windows XP can be modified to support Microsoft’s .msstyles skin format. It does so by patching a system DLL known as uxtheme.dll to disable the digital signing security. This enables anyone to make .msstyles.

The result has been serious competition on Windows XP for the hearts and minds of skin users.

Today, Neowin is interviewing Stardock’s Brad Wardell to get his take on all this. Click here to read the interview.



Neowin: How do you feel about TGT Soft’s Style XP software being compared to WindowsBlinds?

Brad Wardell: At first it bothered us because people seemed to think Style XP was a skinning program. What it does is patch out the Microsoft digital signing protection so that Windows XP can use other Microsoft msstyles formatted skins. So if you’ve spent the better part of 4 years working on skinning software, it can be discouraging to see people compare a system DLL patch with a skinning program. When I or others would point out that it is just a system DLL patch, some assumed that we were attacking it. That wasn’t our intent. If people want to patch their system DLLs that’s their prerogative. But people should be making that decision as an informed one.


Neowin: As a community do you expect Windows XP skinning to increase with WindowsBlinds software or do you expect the market to spout 3rd party applications that will try to sidetrack Windows Blinds.

Brad Wardell: The customization community on Windows is getting a big boost by Windows XP. That’s because XP is much much more stable than Windows ME or Windows 98 to build on. So it allows developers to do much cooler and more useful things. As that community grows, all those part of it benefit. The skin site, WinCustomize is currently having its best month ever in terms of unique users. To put it into specific numbers, it expects to get over 40,000 new registered accounts and over a million visitors. That’s because of Windows XP. One thing people new to customization don’t realize is that Stardock doesn’t “own” customization. Programs like Litestep, WinAmp, and others have been around at least as long and have massive user bases.


Neowin: Apart from Hyper Paint what new features can we expect to see that will directly influence Windows XP over earlier Oses with limited (native) skinning capability on Windows Blinds?

Brad Wardell: Probably the biggest thing about Windows XP is the new driver acceleration APIs. The default visual style engine doesn’t really use these. Because WindowBlinds 3 is coming out after, we have been able to take advantage of these new APIs.

We hope to use hardware acceleration in the future to turn WindowBlinds into a GUI accelerator as well as skinning program. One easy example is the potential of unused video memory on video cads. That Geforce card someone has with 32 megs of memory is largely wasted currently on the desktop. The 32 megs are for textures and such for Quake 3, Counterstrike, etc. What we can do with WindowBlinds (and we’re so far barely scratching the surface of this) is use this extra memory to vastly increase performance.

But we also have to add more skinnable features too. We kind of dropped the ball on some of that. Last winter, we were putting together the WB3 feature set based on the assumption that Microsoft msstyles wouldn’t be digitally signed. In one a case of irony, I may have been the first or at least one of the very first (JediLord on EFNet was probably the first) to create an msstyle skin back late last year.

Things that msstyles can do that WB can’t include mouse-over on radio buttons and check boxes, slider skinning, and list box control skinning. We had planned to have these in WB3 but when Microsoft decided to sign msstyles, we decided to instead focus on trying to make WindowBlinds more of a productivity tool. We really want to get away from the “eye candy” only perception. So we worked on things like SmartBars instead.

But now with WB3 ready to launch, we can focus on 3.x which will provide not just skinning for these controls and mouse over for those controls but things like:
  • Animated mouse over.
  • Sound effects tied to mouse events (such as when you click on a button or checkbox or a mouse over on them).
For example, even WindowBlinds 3.0 supports animated Start buttons. A lot of users didn’t like the green Start button in XP. Not only will users be able to easily change that with WindowBlinds 3, they’ll be able to animate it. All of this with it being faster than using an msstyle thanks to hardware assist. Of course, we have to start documenting this stuff a lot more. J


Neowin: Would you like to see regulation in that an author’s skin is "certified".

Brad Wardell: Regarding certifying, no, I don't think companies should get into the business of having an approval process on skins like that. That would be something that skin sites can do. Skins that cause serious problems usually get moderated.


Neowin: A lot of people have said that WindowBlinds is buggy and slow, how do you respond to that?

Brad Wardell: For a lot of people, WindowBlinds was buggy and slow. That is something we’ve really worked hard to address with version 3. There are so many systems out there and so many variables that it’s been a challenge to make something that works well on everyone’s systems. You used RC1 for instance and it was a disaster. We didn’t take into account what would happen if a user had additional msstyles in their theme directory. The result was that a WindowBlinds skin was applied ON TOP OF an msstyle skin. That’s like having a double performance hit not to mention all the graphics stuff (like fighting for menu painting so that it didn’t show up at all). So a person who downloads something called a release candidate and runs into that kind of problem is going to be pretty skeptical about future releases even though it was a fairly straight forward issue.

Similarly, the typical scenario is that someone tried say WindowBlinds 1.3 or WindowBlinds 2.12 on their Windows ME system. They found it slow for whatever reason or that it was buggy (we had a lot of problems with NVidia drivers– we’ve worked with NVidia on 3.0 and they use XPBench for their own testing, the result was the 21.x series Detonator drivers which work much better). So then these people upgrade to Windows XP and they still have the memory of WindowBlinds on Win98/ME so they think it’s still slow.

But the thing to remember, software, like operating systems evolves. When WindowBlinds 3 comes out, hopefully users will give it a try. And it’ll keep getting better even after that.


Neowin: The reports on the net are that WindowBlinds 3 RC2/Final is faster and uses less memory than Windows XP’s styles. How can this be? How can a third party program be smaller and faster than what comes with Windows XP?

Brad Wardell: Think of it like ones video drivers. The video drivers that ship with XP are usually not the best available. You go out and download new ones to get better performance and reliability. GUI skinning is much the same deal. We use the Windows XP framework just like msstyles does. What’s different is the skin format and the fact we have a small program in memory that can communicate with our DLL to accelerate painting, moving, resizing of windows as well as add features.


Neowin: Okay, even if WindowBlinds is a bit faster and uses slightly less memory, why should someone pay $20 when they can just download Style XP for free and use those skins?

Brad Wardell: There are really 2 versions of WindowBlinds – the “free” shareware version and the enhanced registered version. The goal with the free version is to let people on Windows XP extend it so that they can add additional visual styles. It does pretty much what Windows XP msstyles do (though we currently have scrollbars and a couple other controls disabled in that version). There is no time out on the shareware version. Think of it like Quicktime vs. Quicktime Professional.

The enhanced version has additional features listed partially here: http://www.stardock.com/products/windowblinds/benefits/benefits.html


Neowin: What about skin authors. Are you afraid skin authors are going to switch to msstyles?

Brad Wardell: That will depend on skin author to skin author. I would be surprised if many well known skin authors switched. Not because of any particular bias but because the UIS format is a lot more flexible and their skins will run on a lot more computers.

Skin authors are people who freely give of themselves. These are people who spend a lot of time to create something for the benefit of others. I think for them the skin language will be crucial. And UIS is much easier to create skins that match the vision of the skin author. It’s not well known but WindowBlinds 2 introduced a new skin language known as UIS1+ that is quite similar to msstyles in features. UIS1+ skins are much faster than UIS2 skins and have no real compatibility issues (i.e. even on WindowBlinds 2, someone who found WB “slow” or “buggy” was almost surely using a UIS2 based skin). But skin authors haven’t really embraced UIS1+ because of the same limitations that msstyles would impose on them.

Of course, everything I write above requires a key thing – WindowBlinds skins must function as well as msstyles. Stability and reliability trump features in my experience and that’s going to be the crucial test. Early reports on both sound like both are pretty compatible. But we really won’t know until skin authors start really doing a lot more things with these skin languages.


Neowin: Which skins should people use?

Brad Wardell: The ones they like. It really is about choice. Skins should be seen to be like wallpapers. Does anyone really care whether a wallpaper is a JPG or BMP? People download the wallpaper they want to use (I do anyway). Whichever skins meet their needs are what they’ll use. The format and other considerations won’t matter.

Thank you Brad Wardell for your time.

Relevent Links:
View: Stardock
View: Wincustomize
View: XPBench


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