[noun] - \ko-'da-la-te\ - Code and Effect - solving problems with just enough amount of code - by Adam Najmanowicz
Those that met me more than once know what a geek I am, my eyes basically glow on a sight of a cool new gadget. My wife on the other hand, couldn’t care less, she is as far from a geek as it gets. An email? Something needs to be found on The Web? Why learn anything when you have a guy next to you doing it all for you when you need it, and being hapy about it too!
I’ve not been to the site for a while, so I figured I’ll check if I have not written anything new in the mean time? Nope, it does not look like I did. Nothing to see here? Move along?
Let me start by digressing… I’ve got this Desktop Sidebar installed (wich by the way seems to be one of those viral softwares since a lot of people in the team started using it upon looking at my screen) and on the daily comic roll I’ve got the Mother Goose & Grim displayed in it among others. And looking at todays comic made me roll on the floor laughing (not that it does not usually do it anyway) since I realized that I can totally relate to it in the sense how I feel when I log on to my computer at home.
Originally posted on Wincustomize.com If Stardock gave WindowBlinds version names like Microsoft did with XP and its successor, WindowBlinds 5 would probably be called “WindowBlinds Translucent” or “WindowBlinds See-Through” or… oh no… it can’t be… or can it (?) “WindowBlinds Vista”! In the first part I’ve explained the most noticeable changes you will see in a new WindowBlinds 5 skin but to be honest it went all crazy about translucent parts. We’ve got used to the translucent start panel since 4.6 which I’ve described how to create in this article. But in WindowBlinds 5 you can make the whole taskbar translucent as well as the drop down menus, and the “Please Wait” dialog!
Originally posted on Wincustomize.com One of the coolest features of WindowBlinds 5 is the possibility to define a translucent frames in your skin. This means a lot of things and a lot of new possibilities. Your windows can drop shadows, glow but most of all you don’t have to look at those jaggies if your skin features rounded corners in them. The level of excitement can probably be shown by the fact that it does not have even shown in the public beta, yet it already has artists creating artwork advocating it. and a number of authors creating a mock-ups of the skins they intend to create. I have to admit I do not recall being contacted so much about any previous version of WindowBlinds and any other version that generated such passion among even the MSStyles users.
Originally posted on Wincustomize.com I find a lot of users having problems with how fonts are defined in a WindowBlinds skin. It’s quite simple once you understand it how it’s done. WindowBlinds bases on the premise that most of the skins use just a small number of font variants but use them in a number of places, meaning that one font setting will be used in a number of places like a push button, a tab, a status bar. A font setting in SkinStudio is called “font preset” and is a set of font name, size and formatting as well as its shadow settings. When you think of it in the terms of any word processor a font setting is not different from “styles” used e.g. in Microsoft Word. And they are equally as useful! in contrast to MSStyles where you define the font for every control or its sub style in WindowBlinds you only define it a few times and then use them in multiple places. What’s better… if you decide to change the font in a style, do it only once for the style and WB will change it everywhere the font is used! Let me show you how it’s working on a sample skin for a push button. Every control section has a font setting (at least one) in most cases grouped in the “Fonts” subgroup in its section section.
Originally posted on Wincustomize.com It all started with another brain-freeze today. I just couldn’t find a section that contained the File Dialog places bar images. You know the bar on the left on the File->Save and File->Open dialogs? I bet you’ve been cursing more than once searching for a section like that. SkinStudio will help you with searching for a section if you know it’s UIS name or its part AND if such section actually exist. But in my case it didn’t. Wouldn’t it be great if I could just lookup the section by it’s name or a part of it? So I’ve added a tool button like you can see on the image below.
Originally posted on Wincustomize.com Little I knew that I will be involved in it, when I was posting a while ago on Neowin and WinMatrix about the cool Warcraft skins available on Wincustomize. Blizzard is offering a World of Warcraft suite now for download on their US and European pages pages and upon their request we needed to swiftly modify the Apocalypse’s great World_of_Warcraft skin to meet Blizzard’s request to match the game GUI more closely. I was assigned to the task so I went swiftly to the local store with the perfect excuse to get myself a new toy!
Originally posted on Wincustomize.com
I’ve seen some requests recently to make Blog Navigator run from a flash dongle or any mobile drives in our newsgroups lately. I was not quite comfortable with the inability to change the storage path by the user myself for a while, not to say that the data is stored in a wrong place, on the contrary, this default behavior does not change. But to make it confined to a Local Application Data folder was a bit too harsh. for my taste.
Originally posted on Wincustomize.com
What we really intend to make for you with Blog Navigator is to create a robust and efficient way to manage all your on-line knowledge. You know how hard it is to actually find something useful on the Internet at times, right? That’s where our “Web Search Folders” come to help. You could already organize your knowledge into baskets, but we’ve decided that it’s not enough. While baskets were a great way of organizing your findings and keeping them for later reference, there were a couple of deficiencies of baskets.