Some companies began making skins for money. WindowBlinds, being a commercial product, continued to be developed over that time. Users of uxtheme rationalized their choice by pointing out it was free and it wasn't hard to patch the file.Īnd so for 7 years the two skinning communities developed on a parallel course. The people who went with WindowBlinds would say that they have a lot more skins, could use any msstyles skin converted to WindowBlinds and had a lot more features. So the division in groups largely rested on whether the 20 bucks for WindowBlinds was a sticking points. To get around that, hackers patched out that check and allowed the creation of third-party skins for it called msstyles. Microsoft didn't want people making skins for uxtheme so they added digital signing protection to their skins. On the other hand, uxtheme was free but to use it, users had to apply a patch to crack the theme protection. WindowBlinds costs money ($19.95) but had a much wider variety of skins and was a superset of features of uxtheme. You had those who used WindowBlinds to skin Windows XP and you had those who used uxtheme to skin Windows XP. So back in 2001, the skinning world kind of branched into two groups. So rather than being hurt by XP, WindowBlinds got a free boost. they function the same way, have very similar formats, etc.). WindowBlinds had an advantage in that Windows XP came with a skinning engine called uxtheme that was essentially a derivative of WindowBlinds 2 (i.e. When Windows XP came out, all of the third-party skinning engines went by the wayside except for WindowBlinds. On the content side, there's been teams of artists who have created some cool stuff like Pixtudio, The Skins Factory, SkinPlant, LIghtStar, and so forth. On the software side, there's been great programs like eFX and Chroma (to name two) along with the ubiquitous WindowBlinds. Over the years, I've seen a lot of programs, companies, and ideas come and go. From Object Desktop on OS/2 to working on the very first GUI skinning program on Windows, skinning is a passion of mine. I've been into changing the look and feel of the OS for nearly 15 years now. When it comes to skinning the OS, I'm a fanatic.
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