Benefits of the full version

WindowBlinds 3 Enhanced Registered Version $19.95
Object Desktop (suite of desktop enhancements that includes WindowBlinds) $49.95
  No credit card? Order by check or money order with this form.    

Table of Contents

  1. Overview
  2. Benefit: Skins all your applications
  3. Benefit: Skins scrollbars, progress bars, tabs, spinners, and virtually every other part of Windows
  4. Benefit: Enhanced SmartButton support
  5. Benefit: Change the color of any of your skins on the fly
  6. And More!

Overview

WindowBlinds is the result of thousands of hours of hard work. If you find yourself using it, you need to purchase the full version. Purchasing it allows us to keep improving the program. A program such as WindowBlinds is very difficult to develop because of the thousands of different configurations people run their software on. We are constantly striving to make WindowBlinds better, faster, and easier to use.

To reward users who support our efforts, we add additional features into the full version. By default, WindowBlinds is designed to behave similarly to what users see in Windows XP's default new look behavior.  That is, some GUI elements are not skinned and most existing applications are not supported. We also limit the extended WindowBlinds functions in the shareware version such as SmartButtons and the dynamic colorizing.

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Benefit: Skins all your applications

Because WindowBlinds is modeled after the Windows XP visual style framework, by default it only skins "theme aware" applications.  Windows XP, for instance, does not apply its new visual style fully to most applications because they are not theme aware.  Similarly, the shareware version does not either.  The enhanced registered version, however, treats all applications as if they are theme aware.

On Windows 98/ME/2000 no applications are technically theme aware so we dynamically make selected applications theme aware so that users can get a taste of what a fully skinned application looks like. 

Click on an image to link to a full-sized version on the Internet.

On Windows XP, existing applications are not fully skinned. Note how even Microsoft Word's scrollbars aren't skinned. Other popular utilities and applications are not fully skinned by either Windows XP or the shareware version of WindowBlinds. 

With WindowBlinds 3 installed, here is what the same windows would look like with a different skin applied:

The Enhanced version of WindowBlinds for registered users can fully skin the entire GUI. Notice how Word's scrollbars are now skinned.  The options dialogs of mIRC and FileSync are now fully skinned. mIRC's scrollbars are now skinned.

 

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Benefit: Skinning additional GUI elements

The shareware version of WindowBlinds disables the skinning for scrollbars, progress bars, and other GUI elements.  The enhanced registered version skins these things and more.

 

Scrollbars

 

Progress bars

 

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Benefit: Enhanced SmartButton support

SmartButtons allow users to have configurable areas of the GUI. For instance, a user could configure a SmartButton to be a button that when pressed lists the 5 websites they visit most often. Or it might open their QuickLaunch.

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Benefit: Dynamic Colorizing

Many WindowBlinds skins support dynamic colorizing. What this means is users can change the color of a skin on their own. The latest enhanced versions for registered users also include inverted and greyscale colorizing options for even more flexibility in the look of your OS.

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And more!

Stardock continues to enhance and extend WindowBlinds. Over time, more and more features will become part of the enhanced registered version as a way of thanking our customers.  Be sure to vist http://www.wincustomize.com to select and download from over 1800 freely available WindowBlinds skins!

Visit http://www.windowblinds.net/order.html to purchase your copy of WindowBlinds today.  You can also get WindowBlinds as part of Object Desktop (which is also available on the order page).

 

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Copyright © 1998-2002 Stardock Corporation.  All rights reserved.
Revised: July 19, 2002 .