WindowBlinds 3 Review As Weird As You Wanna Be Eric Grevstad
Once you pay your $20 to register the shareware, all of WindowBlinds' options are available to you, including the ability to skin scrollbars, the tab controls of multipage dialogs (like Display Properties), and progress bars for downloads or file loads. One new feature in WindowBlinds 3 is the option to change a skin's color scheme if you don't like the author's defaults -- in short, to enjoy 16 million choices instead of Win XP's blue, green, and silver.
Speaking of Win XP, Stardock runs a site where you can test your graphics card for compatibility with the new OS' latest alpha-blending options for semitransparent windows and WindowBlinds 3's status as what the company says "may be the first non-game to take advantage of" recent video cards' unused buffer memory for moving windows around without slowing to repaint the screen.
But even without such exotica, you can spend hours tinkering with options -- even specifying different skins for different applications, or excluding certain programs so they'll keep their looks despite WindowBlinds' redesigns. A button added to the Appearance tab lets you manage your skins and fine-tune the utility's settings.
The company insists that WindowBlinds is evolving from mere eye candy to a true productivity enhancement that changes not only how Windows looks but how it works. Realistically, we'd say that process is barely started, although there are glimmerings on the horizon: A few available plug-ins let designers add a clock, pull-down program launch menu, or CD-style audio control panel (that works with WinAmp but not Windows Media Player) to a program's title bar.
And many skins add a Mac-style "rollup" or "window shade" function that shrinks a program to just its title bar, as well as a "pin" function that gives a window always-on-top status. These options sometimes come in handy, although they mean that some skins give different results than you're used to when you double-click or right-click a title bar -- or even move the minimize, maximize, and close buttons to a different location:
But while we still consider it more toy than tool, WindowBlinds 3 is the best Windows interface toy yet. Skins took a few seconds apiece to load on our Athlon/750 Windows XP desktop, but didn't slow down normal operations or hog system resources.
Our only hesitation in recommending WindowBlinds is that it's likely to frustrate users trying to make the leap from beginners (downloading other users' cool skins) to customizers (eager to create their own). To edit skins, you need to download a separate utility called SkinStudio, which guides you through creating a rough-edged starter skin and puts a somewhat graphical, somewhat organized face on the hardcore text-editor scripting that's WindowBlinds experts' equivalent of programming or HTML code.
Still, the learning curve is steep; it takes a lot of time studying other skins and poking through scattered online documentation and tutorial files to learn that a custom Start button, for instance, is a 22-pixel-high, rectangular .BMP image containing five possible versions of the button. Consumers would appreciate friendlier, more Microsoft Picture It-type wizards with more hand-holding steps ("Choose one of these six styles of title-bar buttons," say).
It doesn't help that some items are referred to by several names (skins are also personalities, SkinStudio was until recently BuilderBlinds). And SkinStudio nags you about paying another $20 fee until you realize it's probably best to pay $50 for Stardock's complete Object Desktop suite, which bundles WindowBlinds, SkinStudio, and several icon, toolbar, and other editors with its ultimate-weapon DesktopX object-oriented shell creator.
These are power tools for serious interface designers and GUI geeks, and they indicate that Stardock's software is still more for Web- and script-savvy tinkerers than casual users -- the kind of folks who can appreciate WindowBlinds 3 as a superior successor to the freeware shell LiteStep, rather than those who remember consumer shells like HP's Dashboard or Symantec's Norton Desktop. That said, WindowBlinds 3 is more fun than Microsoft's Plus Pack any day.
