WB obviously

Well, asked here, most people would answer Windowblinds.

Brad, hehehe! About your post on that messageboard, I do remember a poll asking the same question here. Oops! hehehe! (Poll ID #36, if you want to check yourself)

Paxx: Exactly my point.

WHERE a poll is given makes a big difference. That's why I made that poll here at the time, to make that point.

I find the amount of trolling done by msstyles people to be rather bizarre. It's almost as if they're trying to convince themselves that their patch is better than an actual skinning program.

But it's much weirder than that. What exactly is the psychology of rooting for Microsoft to kill off small third party developers? Talk about rooting for the over-dog.

Imagine this scenario:
Our new game, GalCiv is #3 on Amazon.com. It's already grossed into the 7 digit range in < 1 month since release. Now, imagine if enough people had switched to using msstyles and WindowBlinds was just not making that much money any more and we just threw up our hands and said "Screw this, we're done."

Then Longhorn comes out and lo and behold, msstyles no longer work. It's dead. Bye bye msstyles. And there's nothing there to replace it. Who knows. I do know msstyles are gone in Longhorn. Will something replace it? Maybe, maybe not. Imagine if they don't though and there's a decent chance of that. So all these msstyles advocates would suddenly no longer be able to skin. It would be like being back to Windows 2000 again. Imagine if they broke WindowBlinds too so that wasn't a choice.

Do they really think some freeware author is going to create some sort of skinning thing from scratch? It took us 3 years of devleopment, by paid developers, to create WindowBlinds. And we didn't have to deal with Paledium or any of the other security stuff coming up.

The point is, rooting for the over-dog (Microsoft in this instance) seems just plain insane. Anyone who wants to change the way Windows looks by default should be hoping, at the very least, that the third parties (whether that be Stardock or Nullsoft or whomever) do well enough to keep at it.

To use an analogy:
Ever see the movie "Tucker"? About the company that was making cars that were really ahead of their time? One has to wonder who, watching that film woudl be rooting for the big 3 over Tucker. "Screw Tucker! Their innovation just makes things non standard. We don't need no freaking anti-lock breaks or fuel injection!"

I agree there needs to be room for innovation if OS's and computers are to continue to grow. MS has had a very bad habit of doing things well enough to cause trouble for 3rd party developers, and once they dominate, they stop innovating. I for one sure hope StarDock can continue to help us create our desktops the way we want them. MS can design them for the masses, but leave the real art to those of us who don't want to be like everyone else.

WB4 without question

did anyone ever stop to think that uxtheme.dll is easier to use than WB and it sytlexp does not suck down memory?

BTW it looks like longhorn will incorperate uxtheme.dll by letting people dl themes for the OS. read that at a live chat microsoft had.

I know for a fact .msstyles won't be supported. The best you can hope for is that someone will write a converter and it's not apparent whether that will be posisble.

As for "Themes", yes, there will be themes for Longhorn but not the way you're thinking. They want to make it so that you can have like the classic look with themes but with the Longhorn look. They're not talking about skinning.

Err, kona.
*Meep* Wrong answer.
Windowblinds uses less memory than StyleXP or the "native" XP skinning engine.
*Meep* Wrong answer.
uxtheme.dll is not easier to use since it's a system hack and you have to reinstall a new version everytime Microsoft overwrites it with a system patch. Besides, I will never install a skin from people I don't know that are executables, and all MSSTYLES I've seen are in executable format. Highly dangerous. I don't call that easier.

BUT ...
Style XP takes the place of DX, OB, OD, WB, and weblinds. It's a all in one program. That's why people like it. If you take OB, OD, DX, WB, and weblinds, it will take more memory than styleXP

You ARE kidding, right?
Style XP does NOTHING that Desktop, Objectbar or Object Dock does. What are you talking about? Come on, get real.

kona: sorry that´s complete nonsense.

btw: uxtheme.dll is not something you "use". it´s just a patched system file. and how often did MS overwrite it? one time?

paxx: i hope you stay away of DesktopX and it´s support for scripting languages as well. there´s some really nasty stuff that can be done with these.

yes it does. it changes all the scroll bars. it take webblinds and windowsblinds to do that. It also changes the taskbar.

Really?
I don't use Desktop X a lot, but I didn't know that. I thought Deskscript was hardly more dangerous than Javascript.

Desktscript = DX Script. ahem.