I regularly get asked "So what exactly is WindowBlinds?" or "Why would I use WindowBlinds?"  So here's the marketing stuff all together.

Info & Requirements

Developed by: Stardock Corp. (www.stardock.com)
Price: Trial version is free for unlimited time. Enhanced version is $19.95. Can also be purchased as part of Object Desktop suite ($49.95).
OS Requirements: Windows XP or Windows 2000. Windows 98Draginol versions coming soon.
Home Page: http://www.windowblinds.net
More Skins Available at: WinCustomize.com, deviantART, LotsOfSkins, SkinBase, XPThemes.com

Introduction

WindowBlinds is a program that that enables Windows users to completely change the look and feel of the Windows user interface. Windows XP comes with the ability to change its "visual style" between blue, silver, and green as well as switching to "classic" mode. WindowBlinds is the Microsoft certified way of extending Windows XP to support additional "visual styles". WindowBlinds visual styles can change virtually every aspect of the Windows graphical user interface (GUI) such as title bars, push buttons, radio buttons, the Start bar, menus, tool bars, the task pane, dialog backgrounds, and much more. It also adds additional features to the Windows operating system such as roll-up buttons, always on top buttons, URL links, MP3 players, user control over how double clicking and right clicking on the title bar will behave, and many other functionality enhancements. And WindowBlinds 4 is able to do all this while actually increasing the performance of the Windows GUI. WindowBlinds 4 accelerates the Windows user interface both in terms of productivity gains and raw performance. Additionally, it optimizes visual styles on the fly such that they use less memory than the included Windows XP visual styles.

WindowBlinds is part of Stardock's Object Desktop suite of desktop extensions. It is also available stand alone at WindowBlinds.net.
 

So what's the big deal about WindowBlinds version 4 over the previous versions?

People who have used older versions of WindowBlinds may not realize just how much tricky programming had to be done to get it to work at all. Imagine this -- one program that had to run on Windows 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000 and XP. That means WindowBlinds 3 had to work with the "lowest common denominator".

For WindowBlinds 4, Windows XP was the targeted platform. In fact, upon release, it only worked on Windows XP. This allowed Stardock to concentrate on taking advantage of all the goodies in Microsoft's new XP APIs. APIs that the included "uxtheme.dll" don't make full use of.

• msstyles are not hardware accelerated. WindowBlinds are.
   
• msstyles don't make any attempt to avoid duplicate painting of the same thing. WindowBlinds 4 includes "smart painting" which throws out duplicate paint messages. This means that WindowBlinds skins tend to size faster and overall use less CPU when being repainted because they aren't repainted as much.
   
• WindowBlinds interacts directly with shellstyles (the task panel). Programs like Style XP and uxtheme patchers require you to actually *replace* your shellstyles.dll with a hacked one.
   
• WindowBlinds makes use of the same compatibility APIs as msstyles do. WB users can switch into "skin only theme aware applications" and enjoy equal compatibility as msstyles does. Or they can disable that and skin virtually all apps (nearly all non theme aware programs work fine too and problematic ones can be excluded).
   
• WindowBlinds 4 can skin the command prompt. Msstyles can't.

In other words, WindowBlinds 4 behaves more natively than uxtheme does. This is mostly due to timing. Stardock had a year to work with the released version of Windows XP to learn all the new developer features. Whereas uxtheme was developed at the same time as XP and hence didn't have as much time (or incentive) to add in these kinds of features.

Many new users confuse "bundling" with native. Uxtheme.dll is no more part of Windows XP than WBlind.dll. The difference is that when you install Windows XP, this DLL is installed by default. It is worth knowing that one can turn this off completely by disabling the theme service. One of those big svchost.exe processes is actually the theme service. And uxtheme.dll gets attached to every process on your system because it, like WindowBlinds, uses system hooks.
 

The Features
 

The big features of WindowBlinds 4 include:

• Full Skinning of the Windows XP UI. Uxtheme only skins parts of the XP OS and at that only "theme aware" parts. This means parts of the OS look like Windows 95 and parts look like XP and other parts just aren't changed at all.
  
  Compare: Windows XP on its own vs. With WindowBlinds
  
  This also means WindowBlinds skins things like the logon/logoff dialogs, please wait dialogs, and other dialogs not touched by msstyles. In WindowBlinds 4.2, toolbar skinning and the copy, move, delete and other animated images will be skinnable too.
   
• Productive Features such as being able to set what mouse clicks do to the title bar. You could have right click on the title bar minimize a window for instance. You can add more buttons to the title bar such as roll-up, minimize to system tray, always on top, etc. You can put clocks, stock tickers, weather info, etc. into the title bar or anywhere else for that matter.
   
• Free Form Skinning. Msstyles tend to look similar because their borders must be 4 pixels with title bar buttons in set spots. It's more about replacing existing bitmaps with new one than what has traditionally been called skinning. In WindowBlinds, buttons can be placed anywhere, borders, title bars, etc. be any size or shape. As a result, there are visual styles for WindowBlinds that look quite crazy. It is this free form nature that had led companies such as Microsoft themselves to Warner Bros, Touchstone Pictures, Bell South, Nintendo, ATI, nVidia, and many many others to license WindowBlinds for their own use.
   
• Colorizing. You can change the color of your visual styles to any color you want. You can even change the gamma or invert the colors entirely -- on the fly.
   
• You can assign different visual styles to different programs.

Trying WindowBlinds for yourself

You can try WindowBlinds for yourself. It is the world's most popular desktop enhancement with over 6 MILLION downloads at Download.com on its own. It has nearly 2,500 different visual styles on WinCustomize.com alone and more visual styles are made all the time.

Version 4.2 will work on Windows XP, 2000, ME, and 98 and is due out in November.