..Where we are now...

In November Stardock released WindowBlinds 3. Its primary goal was to add some additional productivity features over v2, increase compatibility and integrate it more closely into WIndows, particular on Windows XP.

With nearly a million downloads of it since late November and good reviews, we have had to decide what course to go towards next.

On the one hand, there is more to do still on Windows XP. Specifically WindowBlinds 3.0 doesn't handle the IE scrollbars (neither does XP itself but IE6 was modified to be a partially skinnable browser in itself) and it doesn't handle the web window on the left side. And there are a few GUI controls it doesn't handle.

On the other hand, only a small percentage of the public has XP and most *customer* feedback has focused on things like increased performance, more productivity features, greater control over existing skins.

So in WindowBlinds 3.1, coming out in about a week, we've added real-time gamma correction (change the brightness of a skin on the fly as a user), a brand new skinning language known as UIS1 that creates super fast skins (around twice as fast as an XP visual style as well as a roughly twice as fats as a typical existing WindowBlinds skin).

And we got the Smartbutton stuff fixed up. That along with countless bug fixes that affected everyone from Windows 98 users to Windows XP (very hard to support all these different versions of Windows).

We have gotten the web panel stuff skinned but we have to document a format and provide an example skin before we can put that out, that will probably show up in 3.2. The IE scrollbars we just have to futz with to see what it's looking for. Adding more controls (logoff buttons, spinners, etc.) is mainly a matter of just adding it to the skin language and documenting it so we'll hopefully have that in 3.2 or 3.3.

We also want to try to find a way, if possible, to cache skins. For people who aren't paranoid about using up a couple megs of RAM for increased performance, this option would have the skin stored in a central RAM location and new processes would read from that rather than from disk (if successful, there would be no hit over using no skin at all in loading up a program).

There are always, of course, numerous compatibility things we're working on as well. Contrary to what some people not that familiar with Windows XP may think, XP actually has a massive exclusion list built into the registry. Our goal has always been to try to find ways to make WB work on those programs when possible. We'll continue to work towards that as well.

If you have any suggestions or features that you would like to see in the near term, let us know.