Again, I use Talisman every day and I have had no crashes, none whatsoever, in the last year at the least. I am thinking that you need to work on your system a bit before you do software reviews. This is the same silliness you tried to pin in Windowblinds.

"It might be a good "one button" interface for media centers or libraries (where you don't change themes twice a day), but it's definitely not intended (yet) for active use."

I build my themes on top of PHP and MySQL, and can automate any number of tasks, local and remote. I have been using Talisman off-and-on since mid 1999, build my own themes, and I can do about anything I need to do with it.

Honestly, I don't think you have the expertise to do these reviews. You are careless when talking about crashes and bugs, you don't try to track down the causes because you don't use the software.

Anyone that wants to try Talisman should take this review with a grain of salt and see for themselves.

"I would concur with this review in the sense of stability. "

Stability? So it crashed on you?

I dunno about the flakey part, I'm not seeing what you mean, I guess.. I have yet to see a better taskbar setup in replacement shells, so I guess you have to decide whether you are comparing Talisman to other shells, or to the standard Windows desktop. My own taskbar is pretty damn sweet , though, yes, I have to do things differently than in windows. I use a single pop-up button with a tasklist. No big deal for me because I alt-Tab through them normally anyway.

Talisman and Aston don't have a lot of people making themes for them. I'm not sure what you mean by productivity, but the theme that I use is faster for me than the windows desktop. As for how it compares to Aston and the rest I wouldn't venture to say unless I ported my theme over and used them a while.

In day-to-day use I don't find it unstable or flakey, though. I have to say my theme has been streamlined over months to do what I need it to do. No default theme is going to do that. Do people really use software like this for pre-made themes? To me the real power is always in how you can individualize it.

Yeah, I have to agree with the general idea, though I haven't compared Talisman with Aston. The strength of Talisman is as a desktop replacement instead of a shell replacement. I think that is what Arkadiy was going for with Talisman all along, since many/most people kept Explorer going and just used the windows taskbar.

That has always been LiteStep's curse, too, hasn't it? Most people just want to download other people's themes, and when they do, by the time they re-fit them to their system, they might as well have just made it themselves.

I hate to show my ignorance, but I wasn't aware that ObjectBar was still going strong, I need to look back into it. I had a feeling that with ObjectDock and DesktopX out there that ObjectBar had taken a backseat.

This has made me wanna start skinning some again, lol. I have several shell-style themes laying around in pieces. Mine wouldn't make much sense without all the automated extras, but I could make some stuff that would.

Honestly, and I mean this with all respect to Arkadiy, the creators of Aston, and all the other shells, I don't see a lot of point in replacement shells anymore. My system runs Talisman fine on top of explorer, and the hit to resources isn't anything bothersome to me. .

I think apps like DesktopX are far more relavent than shell replacements, and will become more so as the OS improves. Shell replacements were cool when we were stuck with Win98, but the need to actually replace shells became less important thereafter.

Bakerstreet, let me disagree with you: there're STILL reasons to use shell replacements even now. Let me name them:
1) Resource usage. Even with modern P4 processors there are tasks, which need a considerable amount of RAM and CPU. In some reasons Explorer is coming more and more resource hungry from one version to another. That's a fact. Still nice to mention, that its latest versions are less buggy, than before
2) Customization: it's nearly impossible to add some features, native to current generation shells to explorer. "Upgrading" it by adding numerous small utils, which replace some of its part is IMHO the worse, solution, than replacing a complete shell.
In their current states there are only few shell replacements, that might be called up to the date and even they become "outdated" with time. I'm sure, the situation with shells would remain, even though the main role will be given to more feature rich and flexible shells. The upcoming A2 might be one of them and if all the planned features would be implemented it might even compete new generations of DesktopX as well. Each approach ("decoration" and "replacement") has its advantages and disadvantages: too long to name them here. Let's see, which of them will survive.

Draginol: you interested me in ObjectBar. I missed the latest version, so I should take a look. The last time I checked it was quite an interesting app with lots of features, even though many of them were already implemented in Aston I don't think, that OB can be a shell replacement. From my position it is better applied as a "shell addition", i.e. adding some features missing in a shell.

1) So call us crazy: there are lots of people using Aston, who DO care about additional 10 Mb even having a gig of RAM. Surprised?
2) So enlighten me. At present time Explorer emulation in Aston is very high. I know, that some features (like Taskbar hints) are still missing, but I'd liked to know a third side opinion. sometimes it's useful.

Aston ALLOWS you to have icons on Desktop. BUT you CANNOT have FILES on it (only links). It's not a bug, it's a feature. If you need details, dig for my interview with Nick Egorov. There's a good sample given. Give user what he needs, not what he wants. It's a good approach, IMO.

1) Let's just confess: none of us has EXACT data.
2) Doesn't Right-clicking Desktop work anymore?
3) Surely, only Stardock products seem to " give a lot back" to you

1) We once talked about "popularity". My position about it is still unchainged.
2) "Primitivity" highly depends on your position. The task of alt shell creators has never been in reconstructing Explorer. Explorer itself has numerous features I dislike and which I'd liked not to see anymore. As for "primitive" menus.... You're right, they miss dragon drop sometimes (for me it's not a big loss), but what about toolbars, what about LS-style menus? What about other features, like VDM (build-in into many shells), Explorer has never had? What about Aston multistate disk and recycle bin indicators? What about all the features, implemented by shell plugins? From this position Explorer is just a premature infant.
3) I won't agree with that. That's simple: if a user needs all Explorer features, he's free to stay with the same Explorer. If one needs to retain Explorer style of work, but needs skins, he's free to use one of SD products. You just don't seem to understand the concept of alt shells. As for competing " with what's built into the OS" I might recall one simple proggy: Windows Blinds, which's a kind of competing with MSStyles.
P.S.: just tested recent WB release on a default skin pack plus few winner skins from GUI olympics. Visual glitches in numerous programs make WB nearly useless.

1) Your opinion (and my opinion) are irrelevant. The facts matter when it comes to popularity. Alexa has no bias. There are not likely very many alternative shell users.

2) If you want to compete with the free, built in shell, you have to supercede it.  Do you realize how your argument sounds? Sure, these shells lack being able to put things on the desktop, taskbar grouping, system tray filtering, drag and drop menus BUT they have virtual desktops and different icons for the recycle bin. Whoop. There's a zillion virtual desktop programs out there (such as AltDesk) that you can use with Explorer.

3) WindowBlinds competes with msstyles but it is a complete superset of msstyles. There's nothing msstyles can do that WindowBlinds doesn't do. Plus WindowBlinds does a lot more. 

And don't patronize me about not understanding alternative shells. I've been using alternative shells long LONG before you were I bet.  I just don't see the advantage TODAY, in 2004 of replacing explorer with shells that have fewer features.

And if you find WB to be "useless" I suspect you have hardware problems.  Feel free to post a screenshot of thise "visual glitches" that make WB "nearly useless".

1) The alternative shell community has not really grown that much over the years.  By contrast, desktop customization is pretty popular. I.e. millions and millions of users.

2) You're not going to get users willing to try a product for a month for deciding on it. Not having drag and drop, not being able to store stuff on your desktop and not having taskbar grouping are show stoppers for lots and lots of people.

3) It doesn't matter whether you agree or not on what WindowBlinds can do. It just shows, to me and others who are into this stuff, that your credibility has some issues. WindowBlinds can run .msstyles btw because it is a superset. That's not an opinion, that is an easily demonstratable fact.   I again challange you: Show us some of these visual "glitches".  WB can run in theme aware mode just like msstyles and so will only skin the same amount.

sacrat - I checked out those visual glitches and can see we were talking about entirely different things, so obviously my comment regarding the video drivers is useless. My glitches were more along the lines of odd stripes and bands of color that would appear on certain buttons with certain skins. Different things.

 

Well I looked at them and it's really hard to comment since you didn't even mention what version of WindowBlinds you're using. But I'll comment based on what I can see:

In general I'd say this: For someone who is touting alternative shells in which nearly every theme you download has significant cosmetic issues due to it not being perfectly transferrable to a given target system and only then at a specific resolution, you are amazingly sensitive to "issues" in WindowBlinds and seemingly unwilling to try to even go to the options to tailor WB to your needs. For examples:

1) Your console window. XP doesn't skin console windows at all. It's OFF by default in WindowBlinds because it isn't something that all users will be able to use.  But you turn it off and try to turn the fact that WB even does console windows at all into some kind of negative.

2) Cryilic, I don't know what version of WindowBlinds you're using. I've not heard reports of WB having issues in Russian but it's possible. 

3) Menu skinning is something exclusive to WindowBlinds.  XP can't skin menus because some apps behave badly. Perhaps the app you have there is one such app. But it is something that A) is OFF by default in WindowBlinds and can obviously be toggled on and off based on your own needs and c) Has a PER application setting so if there is some application with strange owner drawn menus you can exclude the menu skinning on just that app.

4) I don't know what app that is, but I have a screenshot below of most of the apps I could identify all running just fine.

5) Opera runs just fine with WindowBlinds (see screenshot below I took).

Now, Sacrat, if you want to really get obnoxious we could to various tit for tat of "Hey look at how program X does something funny on my system!" we can do that. None of your screenshots (other than the Crylic) show a "bug" in WindowBlinds. They show an incompatibility between a WB feature in a specific program in which you, the user, have full control over fixing. That would be like me bitching that every time I try an Aston theme it has short cuts to programs I don't have.

It's like the guy who gets Doom 3, turns on every visual option and then screams because his system has problems with all the visual candy turned on.  At some point, especially in Windows customization, the user has to take some responsibility for their own systems. If you're using some obscure app with funky menus that combine icons and checkboxes and such all together, it's really up to the user to take the 30 seconds to exclude the app's menus. It's not a "bug" in WindowBlinds (if you want to get right down to it, it's the app's job to properly set the ownerdraw parameters but some developers don't bother).  That's a basic premise of alternative shells that's for sure.

Users who download a given Aston theme have to go through and tweak it up for their own systems.  You know this. And yet here you make these statements that WindowBlinds is buggy and when asked to put up and shut up this is the best you can do? Show some menu skin problem on some app in which you could easily turn it off? Or a skinned console window you could fix yourself? In a perfect world, these programs would automatically detect the user's setup and adjust themselves. But we aren't in a perfect world.  And if you had loaded up WindowBlinds with its DEFAULT configuration, none of the issues you show screenshots of would have occurred (other than the crylic issue which I'll have to look into).

Your screenshots demonstrate to me that you essentially went out of your way to find something to nit-pick (except for the Crylic which if WB does have problems with foreign language versions of Windows then that's legitimate).  I mean come on, you're picking on WB because when you turned on console window skinning you had some problem? Or turning on menu skins and then finding some app that you don't identify as having problems with that? And then you turn around and advocate for people tossing out the Windows shell in exchange for some alternative one made in Russia? A double standard don't you think?

If you were some newbie, I'd tend to be more understanding. But for goodness sakes, you're touting ALTERNATIVE SHELLS and then you turn around showing screenshots that essentially (other htan the crylic one) boil down to you not being willing to use the per application feature or uncheck a given feature that on your system gives you problems. That's quite a double standard.

It boils down to this: With WindowBlinds, a user MAY have to tweak the settings to make sure it's compatible with their system.  With an alternative shell, such as Aston, they WILL have to tweak it to make it compatible with their system (whether that be fix broken short cuts or run at the "correct" resolution and not change it).

My screenshot is, at least, represenative of what the typical WindowBlinds user is going to experience. Someone having a problem with WindowBlinds is going to be the exception, not the norm. I think a random look at the topics in http://www.astonshell.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=2 would make someone conclude that someone touting Aston is in a glass house to be throwing stones at the world's most popular desktop customization program - WindowBlinds.

Well to answer that: First off, the average non-tech is not going to CHANGE the defaults. If you hadn't change the defaults, you wouldn't have had those issues.  So WB "out of the box" would have been fine other than the Crylic issue which you still haven't mentioned which version of WB you were using.

Secondly, the average non-tech isn't going to be running obscure shareware programs that do funky things. You didn't identify what programs those were but I couldn't recognize them and I use a lot of software.

Thirdly, default or not, nearly EVERY Aston theme (as well as Litestep, Hoverdesk, DesktopX, etc.) has to be tweaked considerably. Do you think the averge non-techie is going to understand why they can't click on MS Word and have it just load up? 

You are applying a double standard here that I find a bit repugnant.  For WB, you go and change the defaults and then say "See, WB has problems on this unspecificied program running on Russian Windows!" 

But then you turn around and say this:

Most shells work flawlessly without tweaking, and this tweaking has nothing to do with visual bugs

You're just not credible when you say things like this.  Especially when the FIRST post on the Aston forum on its site says:

All these fantastic looking themes have premade buttons for applications I dont want to use :-/ For example, Universal, is an amazing looking theme. One of the best so far. But it has multiple buttons for things I dont want that i can't change. It has PS6, totalcommand and ICQ. Three applications I never plan to use. I understand that they are very nice looking buttons and the rollover effects are very nice but its very starnge clicking on ICQ to start up MSN.

There's nothing "buggy" about WindowBlinds if there is some application that draws its own funky menus. It just means WB can't work with that particular program without the user excluding that particular feature on that app (which takes only a few seconds to do). It's not some "bug" in WindowBlinds any more than Aston not being able to scan a user's system to see what apps are on their system and modify the theme on the fly appropriately.

I showed a screenshot above with Opera. Where's the Opera bugs you claimed? I am copying a file on the network. Where's the bug there? THis is what most people running WB experience. That's why it's so heavily in use.  And the biggest reason alternative shells aren't popular is because they require so much work to tweak them for your own system.

sacrat : I have looked at your problems and have the following comments:

1) The russian font issue is most likely a side effect of the font the skin decided to use for its menus. If that font didn't support the Cyrillic chars then you would get a problem. This is NOT a WindowBlinds problem. You could do the same by setting that font for menus in classic mode. HOOGE OS_53 isn't exactly a standard font!

2) The BAT. Your progressbar issue with it painting the progressbar slightly incorrectly is probably due to the app being themeaware and the WB version being WB shareware. One version fo WB shareware had part of the progressbar skinning code enabled by mistake and thats what happens. Non shareware versions of WB should not have that problem and the upcoming 4.4 shareware release should not either.

The circular progress indicator painted perfectly here for me. Its possible your problem occured because of a colour scheme combination that is used by that skin. If so again this isn't a WB bug as you could do the same thing in classic mode.

3) Your console windows. Assuming you left everything at defaults, your console windows can't be being skinned by WB. This means the problem is actually being caused by something else. In particular look for a process called SDMCP on your machine. Its part of DesktopX and ObjectBar but its not included with WIndowBlinds. That process has been known to cause clipping of command prompts for some reason when it loads during bootup. This is being investigated by Stardock still.

4) Without knowing which application your one icon issue occured in and how to reproduce I can't really say much about it other than to say it may well be a side effect of the skin defining a custom tick image while the app assumed (incorrectly) that the tick would be transparent and could be overlayed onto the background. We don't know what is under that tick, could it be just an empty circle?

5) Your menu not being painted totally. I was unable to reproduce this with abilon and WB 4.38.

I would suggest you wait for WB 4.4 to be released, try that out and if you still have problems then let us know. Obviously issue number 1 certainly isn't going to go away.