WindowBlinds 3.4 vs. Msstyle


  

71 members have voted

  1. 1. WindowBlinds 3.4 vs. Msstyle

    • Windows Blind
      18
    • Msstyle
      53


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I voted WB. Mainly because I know how to skin it. But to be perfectly honest they both have their good and bad points. I use both equally.

I'd have to agree with 2pac though, WB is quite limited as to what it can and can't skin. When WB can skin everything that msstyles does then there will be no competition!! :p

Come on Stardock get it skinned! ;)

Originally posted by honz12

I voted WB. Mainly because I know how to skin it. But to be perfectly honest they both have their good and bad points. I use both equally.

I'd have to agree with 2pac though, WB is quite limited as to what it can and can't skin. When WB can skin everything that msstyles does then there will be no competition!! :p

Come on Stardock get it skinned! ;)

What is WB not skinning?

Uhm, yeah what he said.

Windowblinds skins everything that msstyles does, except for the treeview arrows and the shellstyle of course.

There are a lot of rumours going around about windowblinds that simply aren't true. It skins almost everything, and it skins every program, unless you don't want it too. It is not slow nor a resource hog. You should try it.

I happen to use both windowblinds and msstyles. I have to admit that I use msstyle more because I prefer the styles that are out there. There just aren't as many cool WB skins.

No I don't work for stardock.

classic "notheme" for me.

but if i had to choose i'd prolly go w/ msstyle...i don't understand how StarDock can hype saying that WB takes up less mem than msstyle dlls:ponder: in order to use WB in xp you have to enable theme service so you have both loaded in the mem. sure WB might be smaller, but total end result is more memory wasted.

if what they say is true and ms "borrowed" stardock's method..if stardock never existed ms would prolly invent their own skinning engine that could be hella better..but it was cheaper to use existing code.

Originally posted by chavo

Windowblinds skins everything that msstyles does, except for the treeview arrows and the shellstyle of course.

There are a lot of rumours going around about windowblinds that simply aren't true. It skins almost everything, and it skins every program, unless you don't want it too. It is not slow nor a resource hog. You should try it.

come on guy be serious, wb can't skin sliders, trust me honz tried to do it and it didn't work

Originally posted by deadzombie

I don't understand the 3rd party discrimination argument though. That's like saying you don't want Winamp to play your music, Nero to burn your Cd's or Photoshop to edit your images.

I think what they mean with the 3rd party descrimination thing is that they do not want a 3rd party program always running that must be running in the background in order to skin windows. With Photoshop and Nero you open them to perform a task and then you can close the program.

I prefered msstyles for this very reason, but then again I always had my sweet DesktopX dock running. ;)

Originally posted by Neil Banfield

What is WB not skinning?

OK, I'll bite.

First of all I think you've picked me up completely wrong! Although I use msstyles equally to WB I was in no way slating WB what-so-ever. I voted for WB!!

I fully support Startdock in their WindowBlinds program, I've been skinning WB for over two years.

But come on man, don't kid yourself........

OK, here's a list,

1. Sliders/trackbars

2. Popup menus from the taskbar....I'm talking about quicklaunch icons, or any other toolbars which have been set to menus in the taskbar.

3. WB 3.4 claims to skin the toolbar bkgrnds.....if so explain the pic below.

4. I think these are part of the shellstyle, but what about the whole task panel area in window explorer windows? A pretty main feature of any explorer window I would think.

Now before any loyal Startdock supporters come in here and start flaming me, I'd like to explain that I'm not saying WB sucks.....I'm just saying that I wish Stardock would hurry up and get the things mentioned above skinned!

Anyone who knows me, knows I would never slate WindowBlinds.

WB_skins_everything.jpg

Originally posted by honz12

OK, I'll bite.

First of all I think you've picked me up completely wrong! Although I use msstyles equally to WB I was in no way slating WB what-so-ever. I voted for WB!!

I fully support Startdock in their WindowBlinds program, I've been skinning WB for over two years.

But come on man, don't kid yourself........

OK, here's a list,

1. Sliders/trackbars

This is known and should be resolved in 3.5. Remember that we have to extend this back to non XP and this takes time to develop and test.

2. Popup menus from the taskbar....I'm talking about quicklaunch icons, or any other toolbars which have been set to menus in the taskbar.

This seems to be an oversight. Expect the next build on OD to use the grouped item menus or the all programs menus for this.

3. WB 3.4 claims to skin the toolbar bkgrnds.....if so explain the pic below

I just checked this out on Windows XP and it works perfectly.

The skin author just needs to define the [ToolbarBackground] section in the UIS file (do not put it in the xpstuff file)

Thats been in since 3.0 and has never had any issues to my knowledge.

4. I think these are part of the shellstyle, but what about the whole task panel area in window explorer windows? A pretty main feature of any explorer window I would think.

The shellstyle dll is a MS copyrighted dll and cannot legally be distributed with ANY skin. It would be trivial to implement it in the same way as 3rd party msstyles, but we feel this is not the way to do it as it would prevent themes being distributed legally.

We are working on a legal solution though.

i'll switch to windows blinds the day its free :) not paying for looks of a desktop :ermm:

might just test it out on the demo but they really need to get a way to list both!!! msstyles and wb themes, i didn't like that in the last version i tried :(

Neil,

Thanks for your answers, clear and precise.

I'll have to check my UIS for the toolbars thing, as it could well be in the xpstuff file and not the UIS.

And I already knew the reason why the task panel area wasn't skinned by WB (legal reasons) I was just bringing it up again so it was fresh in your minds ;) It would be awesome if you guys could find some way to work around for this and still stay legally correct. You only have to look at some of the msstyles that have been made to appreciate how much it can improve a window. E-Platino by Y/C is the best example I can think of.

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