WindowBlinds 6.3 Review

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4 February 2009 No Comment

Well I finally decided to give WindowBlinds another try. First of all some general information for all who don’t know this handy tool:

WindowBlinds is a program that enables Windows users to completely change the look and feel of Windows users interface. Users customize Windows by using visual styles (skins) created for WindowBlinds. With these skins, WindowsBlinds can change the look of titlebars, borders, buttons, taskbars, Start menu, progress animations, toolbar icons, Explorer views, and virtually every other part of Windows!

Features

Explorer backgrounds feature. This allows users to change the background of their explorer windows and control the color and opacity. 30 different background textures can be selected by the user including no texture, wet paint, various marbles, and ice effects.
Support for 3 additional title bar buttons on per pixel skins. These support roll up, help, always on top and command buttons.
Support for dialog background bitmaps – This was disabled on Vista in previous builds.
Added additional glass explorer sections. These will show up in the future
SKS6 builds.
64 bit build synced with 32 bit version.
Blue edge on logoff dialog cancel button removed Tweaks to dialog background bitmaps Misc tweaks
Note that the 64 bit XP build has not been updated. 32 bit apps on 64 bit XP will support the new per pixel buttons, but 64 bit apps will not.

To use the very common .WBA format you will need WindowBlinds . For a cheap fee of $19 bucks you are getting a lot of content. By now there are whole sites that offer thousands of WindowBlinds themes. Let’s see what’s available out there.

Content

WindowBlinds is the most popular skinning tool that is available, therefore there are thousands of themes that are *exclusively* available for WindowBlinds.

There are many resources where you can find premium themes for WindowsBlinds:

- Customize.org

- Stardock’s Library 500+ Premium themes

- DeviantArt WindowBlinds themes

Most themes I would consider as premium, the quality is extraordinary high! A great community creates new and fresh themes 24/7.

Content: 10/10 Points (Big advantage here)

Installation / Usability

The installation is very easy and there is not much you have to do to install a theme. In WindowBlinds you only have to do two clicks to apply a theme, but if you try to apply a 3rd-party Windows theme it will usually be a lot more difficult and will require several tweaks before it will even work (e.g. patching the uxtheme.dll). Of course it’s more challenging to install a 3rdparty theme, but most of the time you will get better results using the easy WindowBlinds-method simply because there are so many great themes available and you can still fine-tune every detail!

Usability: 9 /10 points.

The latest WindowBlinds release is 6.3 by now:

WindowBlinds 6.x [CD]

Version 6.3 adds new layering effects to windows, faster performance, and texture options for skins.

Want to see 6.3 in action - click on image to enlarge

One of the real advantages of WindowBlinds is that you can style stuff your normally can’t. For example you can add background images to the Explorer, which would be nearly impossible without WindowBlinds.

Click on image to enlarge:

Posted by sOliver

About :
I am the founder of http://windows7themes.net and http://vistadesktopthemes.com. In my free time I love blogging and I am a tech enthusiast; if there is something new out there I got to try it out! As a web developer, I also have a passion for programming and design.