| What is Window Blinds? |
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| Window Blinds is a new type
of utility. It lets you decide how Windows 95, 98, & NT 4 look.
You can change the style of titlebars, buttons, toolbars and more.
You can even have bitmaps on the background of windows in the place of
the default grey. There are other features like the smoothscrolling
which makes applications that used to jump when you used pageup / pagedown
now smoothly scroll. |
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| So exactly what features
are in the current version? |
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| The current release supports
many features and has 2 plugin interfaces. There are SDKs for these
so any 3rd party can implement a different titlebar style or button style
just by implementing a small amount of drawing code. All the rest
of the work is done by Window Blinds |
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| Titlebar Changer |
There are 2 inbuilt styles.
Graduated and Mac style. These have a few options to adjust how they
look and perform. There is also a plugin interface which lets you
do your own style. 1 plugin is supplied which lets you use bitmaps
for your titlebar elements |
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| Button Changer |
New in Public Beta 4.
It has 5 inbuilt styles and a plugin interface. The styles built
in are flatter buttons, hot-tracking flat buttons, more rounded 3D buttons,
popup buttons and hi-lighting text buttons |
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| Convert
toolbars to the new flat style |
This makes all toolbars
that use the standard toolbar common control change it to a flat version
instead of the 3D version |
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| Background
Bitmaps |
This lets you use a background
image in place of the default background in many places. There are
3 bitmaps. The 1st for the background of dialogs. The 2nd for
the background of MDI parent windows and the 3rd for explorer folder windows. |
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| Expanding
menus and windows |
This makes the windows and
menus appear to expand when they open. |
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| Make
scrolling smoother |
This feature makes applications
like Netscape Navigator smoothly scroll when paging up or down. It
even works with notepad! |
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|
| Make
desktop icon text transparent |
This makes the icon text
for icons on the desktop have a transparent background. This means
it blends in better with your background image. |
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| Collapse
to caption |
This feature lets you shrink
an application down to it's titlebar and back. When using the mac
style, an extra button is added to the titlebar to use this feature.
If not then right clicking the window border will activate this feature. |
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| and more... |
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| What about some screenshots? |
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| Here are a few screenshots
of the latest version |
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  This
is a screenshot of the latest version running in mac style. The buttons
are (from left to right) close, collapse to caption, maximize & minimize.
These buttons can be pressed in and out and change when pressed in.
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  This
is a screenshot of the latest version showing graduated titlebars, background
bitmaps and the hot-tracking buttons. As you can see the backgrounds
of the hot-tracking buttons are transparent so any background bitmap shows
through correctly.
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This is a screenshot of the
BeOS style titlebar plugin and explorer backgrounds on. This is under
Windows 95 OSR2 without Internet Explorer 4.
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If you want to see any of
the other features you had better download it and try it on your computer.
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Page last updated
28th June 1998
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