Two year ago, StarDock organised the GUI Olympics, a cross site skinning contest. The idea was that anyone could join the team of their favourite skin site and create a WindowBlinds-skin in order to compete in several categories.

The site with the most medals was LotsOfSkins (six gold, two silver and two bronze), while the best skinner turned out to be none other than Grayhaze.

Unfortunately, all of it was overshadowed by a massive flame. Can't really recall what the hell it was all about, but I think it had something to do with the rules being changed all of a sudden, people asking other changes to the rules and in general, folks taking things way too serious.

That's why there were no GUI Olympics last year.

Details on this years contest are fuzzy at the moment. There are going to be three categories: WindowBlinds, Icon packages (?) and “one of the popular media players”, meaning either Windows Media Player 9 or WinAmp 5.

My instinct tells me it will be WMP9 and not WinAmp, the former being easier to skin, unless Nullsoft's going to sponsor things.

Apparently, there already are two sponsors for this event and at least 10k of prizes, so this should be interesting. || craeonics | comments (9)

Those that need to know probably already know, but yesterday windows interface hacking god, WinT(weaker) announced he was going to quit his customisation site, WinT's Windows Modifications:

“The actual announcment however is just that I can no longer continue to provide updates to my site, much less participate in the forums as I used to... and when thought about logically, even before my new job, etc... it was becoming extremely difficult to find new mods and hacks, as I had basically reached the end of my modding rope so to speak I just couldn't think of anything else”

Plans are being made to keep the site alive, as it has become quite a hub for windows modification. They range from keeping it the way it is to merging it with VirtualPlastic.

Moral of this story: work and play don't mix. || craeonics | comments (7)

Missed the release two days ago, but fortunately, rainy was kind enough to post a bugfix today, so we're not that outdated.

Rainlendar, if you don't know, can be safely called the most popular calendar app in Skindom. Originally starting out as a LiteStep module, this has evolved into one versatile app (for a calendar).

The changelog is immense, so I'm not going to quote it. Visit its site for the nitty gritty instead.

By the way, we have an interview with Rainy lined up for issue 13 of Tek. The interview was conducted in December, so if I hurry up and finish the issue, it might not be too ancient when published. || craeonics | comments (2)

A couple of days (alright, more than a week) ago, Sonique2 was released as beta. Work on the next incarnation of this once grand media player has been going on for many years now, so it's about time this beta came out. Okay, so technically speaking, beta's have been rolling out all this time. I never picked one up since the alpha aeons back.

Back in its prime, its rivals were the almighty K-Jöfol and WinAmp2. Nowadays it has to battle with Windows Media Player, WinAmp5 and perhaps foobar (got to include my fave player). Can it reclaim its place or will it remain in its niche, with its die-hard following?

This beta is distributed as an installer (evil!) weighing in at over 3 megs (evil!), but it's worth it. This is one of the slickest installers I've come across, completely skinned and feeling like a flash movie.

Okay, so it gave me an error upon trying to install the packaged WMP9 visual (why the hell does Sonique come with an installer for WMP?), but that may have something to do with WMP not existing on my system (which begs the question, why did I select that option in the first place then?).

The default skin reminds me of Flash even more, with interface parts whizzing around at a click. Unfortunately it also reminds me of why I never bothered about Sonique. Big, bulky, trying to stick everything into one window. Luckily though, there are skins out there that are less bulky and it has this thing called ‘remotes’: stripped down, smaller interfaces with only the controls you really need. Often freeform and therefore far more appealling.

The underlying Mantis skin engine seems quite interesting. Sonique2 skins are basically zipped up collections of multi-layered .psd's (that's right, Adobe's flagship's native format), driven by a xml-esque .mml-files that can even incorporate scripting. Oh, and naturally, alpha transparancy. At first I didn't notice that, as the default skins has been cut out like it's a plain old #ff00ff magic pink thing, but it's definitely see-through.

If you would have asked me to define the future of skindom a few years back, I would have said: layered skinning, alpha transpanrecy and scripting. WinAmp3 was the first to deliver that (though be it horribly undocumented) and now Sonique2 seems to pull it off as well (note that previous alpha's released years ago also where capable of this, though).

Ofcourse, being a beta, it is not without flaws. The app takes a while to load, it seems to have some trouble with z-ordering (staying below my other windows, even though it has focus) and sometimes it's not all that responsive (and it currently seems to use over 100 megs of virtual memory, what the?). But all in all, this looks very interesting.

I'm completely possessed by foobar though, with no need to have a player on screen as it is controlled by hotkeys, so in that respect this is not for me. Besides, coming up with a good freeform skin is damn hard.

Add to that that Sonique2 has support for a number of file types, like MP3 and Ogg Vorbis, but not MusePack, which just happens to be the format I rip my cd's to. Ergo, not too usefull for me.

Pearls for the swines? Heresy? Ah well, such is life. || craeonics | comments (3)

Have to cut down on the ‘in-depth reviews’ of each release, or else we (read: I) will never get our thirteenth issue rounded up (time spent on posting news is time lost for working on #13).

So, I'll just quickly scoot over the new releases of these last few days. Must not write review, must not write review… || craeonics | comments

Spotted this news over at ShellFront (who found it elsewhere), an interview with the creator of WinAmp, Justin Frankel, in Rolling Stone.

With WinAmp being, like, one of the first skinnable apps ever (if not the first) and probably one of the flagships of Skindom; and NullSoft having the reputation of being ‘rebels’ (be it just or not, it clicks with me), this is quite an interesting read.

Main surprise to me was not so much the amount of cash he got for signing up with America Online, but rather his age. I'm feeling like quite an old man over here. All these young kids raking in fortunes, where have I gone wrong? || craeonics | comments (5)

Skinnables has always been floating out there. Nothing really happened to it and nobody ever expected anything to ever happen there. So it was a bolt from the blue when founder and long time antagonist panda integer called it quits.

Yeah, that's right. He's history. Retiring to some godforsaken island that lies beyond the Pillars of Heracles.

So what's going to happen to skinnables? Plastic and red are taking over the helm and they're getting help from none other than pogrelz.

Now poggles is mostly notorious within certain circles for axeing ModZine, so this should be interesting. || craeonics | comments (6)

Originally released the 10th, yet I only noticed it some days ago at WinCustomize. Together with its symbiont NextStart, this used to be one of Skindom's big apps.

Due to its shareware nature ($29.99) and my aversion of said concept, I never bothered to try it out. Time to give it a spin now then.

WorkShelf (3.8 meg 30-day trial installer download, urgh!), along with the afore mentioned NextStart and FontBrowser, is part of the WinStep software suite. The binding factor of these apps is that they were developed in order to bring the NeXT OS feel over to the Windows platform. Or at least the devs were heavily inspired by it.

It's not the only app that tries to mimic NeXT. Rival and current holder of the crown, HoverDesk has also taken this route. Hell, Apple even morphed parts of it into their OSX dock.

But what is it? WorkShelf is basically a tabbed app launcher/task bar hybrid dock thingy. It's got a floating clock and trash can, but those are rather insignificant compared to the ‘tabbed shelf’, as the dock is called. Let that shelf ‘dock’ to the bottom of the screen and you find it looks mighty impressive.

Shelves can consist of special folders like the desktop, recent files, control panel and so on, but also display the contents of a user-defined folder or drive or currently running tasks. Best thing of this though is that drag'n'drop is fully supported. You can drag thing from tab to tab or to or from your file manager.

As said, I'm not too impressed by the modules: a talking clock and a trash can. They just float and, unlike in HoverDesk, can't dock or anything. However, you can add them to one of your shelves, which looks much better, if you ask me.

Things to add to your shelf are thus not only apps and folders, but also modules and special commands, like commands to control WinAmp from your shelf.

Although it is a separate app, it doesn't really do WorkShelf any justice if you run it without NextStart. Compared to the Explorer shell, WorkShelf is your taskbar, while NextStart is the start menu. Running one without the other is like losing out on your start menu or taskbar. Yeah it works, but it feels like you're missing something. It's like eating a cheese sandwich without the cheese (or sandwich for that matter).

Something which becomes even more obvious if you look at the themes that came with the package, which supply a skin for both WorkShelf and NextStart (and show a preview image of both).

Since I never, ever ran the app before today, the change list is one big enigma to me. One thing I can conclude though, is that this thing has more features than I had expected at first sight.

I only wonder where my tray went.

Oh wait… Because WorkShelf is not a shell and does not try to hide whatever underlying shell you might be running, any normal user would still see his or her start menu, taskbar and tray. But since I am one of those evil alternative shell users, my setup is quite different.

That's why I couldn't find the tray in WorkShelf. It does not have anything to do with it. Doh! || craeonics | comments (3)

There goes my new year's resolution of putting up news every day.

Luckily I have a scape goat: my connection's been rather flaky these last few days. Couldn't reach most of the sites. Hell, couldn't even reach Tek itself. Very strange.

Anyhow, time to do some catching up. || craeonics | comments

If you're one of those happy LiteStep users, like me, you tend to loose sight of what else goes around in Shell Land. Case in question: “bbLean, a new BlackBox for Windows Generation”.

According to the Blizzle news post I'm stealing all this from and the download itself, this would appear to be a new thing. But the copyright notice says 2003 and this is a 1.10, so I've missed out on the release of 1.0.

bbLean is a shell based on the BlackBox for Windows (bb4win) shell, which in turn tries to emulate the *nix BlackBox Window Manager.

Prime characteristic of BlackBox and its siblings is that it is quite minimal window manager/shell, consisting of a taskbar, four desktops and a popup menu. Most notable innovation of these shells (bb4win, Xoblite and BlueBox) is that all module share the same theme, meaning that you don't have to individually configure each and every module. Theming BlackBox is a bit like the use of style sheets in websites, if you know what I'm saying.

This also means that changing your theme is much, much smoother than in LiteStep.

So what's bbLean's flavour? In their own words:

bbLean

• is an advanced experimental version of Blackbox for Windows
• is fully compatible to 0.90 bb4win builts and plugins
• comes with many features, which you will not yet find in the main line of bb4win

It has a completetly rewritten menu system with user frienly popup and close delay, support for shellfolders, rightclick context menus, scrolling with button or mousewheel, and now also drag and drop and keyboard navigation. See 'Changes' for more.

So you are invited to check it out!

New in this version (aha, seem like 1.0 came out back in September 2003 and development started in April 2003):

10 Jan 2004 - bblean v1.10

• drag & drop from and to menus.
• keyboard navigation for menus.
• all menu commands available as bro@ms
• Load and unload plugins on the fly from the config menu. (Credits to qwilk for the idea and the working example).
• New menu item [insertpath] to join several folders in one menu.
• Toolbar and menus toggle with plugins.
• Added menuitems to set numbers. Hold down Ctrl for faster progress
• Task flashing support

I love cut & paste.

Let me run this and get you a screensh— oh my god, it has a built-in window skinner! Sweet!

Installation is a mere click on the .exe. Installation as your default shell ofcourse is a bit more work (run the .exe with -install as parameter).

Configuration goes via a number of heavily commented text files (with the .rc extension), so that shouldn't be too hard either.

Anyhow, I could go on some more, but I'm trying to watch a movie at the same time. This is good stuff. Do check it out if you're into shells.

Will it convert me from LiteStep to BlackBox? Naah. || craeonics | comments (7)

StarDock has released Release Candidate 2 of its freeware boot screen changer. — WinCustomize

Says enough, me thinks. How can you release a release candidate?

BootSkin skins the ‘boot’ process of WindowsNT, 2000, XP and Longhorn. On 2000 (NT5) and XP (NT5.1) it does this by overlaying the default graphical load sequence (the Windows flag with the progress bar) with a 16 colour, 640x480 image. And it skins the progress bar as well.

I have no idea what that would look like on NT (NT4), since the only thing you see there during booting is some white text on a blue background.

What's so interesting about BootSkin though, is that it allows you to alter the ‘boot’ sequence without having to hack your kernel, the core of your OS.

Boot skins are quite popular, but up until BootSkin, the only way to distribute them was to either pass around hacked kernels or distribute the images and use tools to insert them into the kernel.

The first isn't really viable, because a) the kernel (ntoskernel.exe) is about two megs in size, whereas a 16 colour 640x480 bitmap weighs a mere 150k; b) it's your kernel we're talking about. Potential virus galore; c) distributing cracked files is usually dubbed ‘warez’; and d) you can forget about applying service packs when using a hacked kernel. They won't take the bait and will refuse to install. Trust me, I've tried.

The second could work (I did it that way), but it's only for the computer savvy.

This is where BootSkin steps in. In theory, it should make the process of altering your boot screen accessable to the average Joe Blow.

Judging by the countless questions asked about BootSkin since 0.1 came out months ago, though, it remains to be seen if this still holds weight in practice.

I'm quite curious how it does this, if it doesn't need to hack the kernel. It would seem to be some kind of hook or an app that gets run whenever the OS starts.

BootSkin seems to be stable. I've been running version 0.1 for months now without any problem. Making skins is a cinch, so you should be up and running in no time.

This version (873k installer) adds a preview window of what your boot process would look like and smoothens the progress bar animation.

Note how I've quoted the word ‘boot’ up there. When I think of booting, I think of the BIOS screen being displayed, a POST test, and a beep, after which the OS gets fired up.

In that sense, when one speaks of “skinning the boot sequence”, Multiple Boot Manager comes closer to what I have in mind. I use them both, so on boot I first get my MBM-skinned boot selector, followed by BootSkin skinning Windows while it starts. || craeonics | comments (4)

Expanded the site with an rss feed. Now I can safely trash Nuke.

No wait, still have to redirect everyone that has Tek bookmarked at the wrong location! Argh…

It would be interesting to see how many people actually have Tek bookmarked. Judging by the logs, the bulk of the visitors are lured in here via DevArt. Imagine how many ‘artists’ suddenly find themselves here, wondering where the hell they are, how they got here and how they can get out of here.

And as of now, it's also possible to comment on the news.

I opted for comments in a popup window to streamline things. I think this is easier on the user than having to go through multiple full page reloads. Let me know if you find this an improvement over the regular method or not. || craeonics | comments (13)

Word has it that the 6th of January is the last day on which you can wish someone “happy new year” and still get away with it. One might deduct from that that I'm just in time to kick off 2004 with this brand, spanking new version of Tek.

Alright, a bare-bones version of Tek, with minimal functionality and minimal interactivity. But hell, as long as it looks infinitely better than what we had.

In the days, weeks and months to come (you know me), things will expand, new features added, etcetera.

So what do we have now?

• all of our issues ofcourse
• news (as in: what you're reading now), albeit somewhat static. Still have to come up with a good news script, so until then, I'll do things manually
• an about page, giving some background info on Tek. Can't say that I'm too happy with the text as it is, but that's what you get when you write it at four in the morning.
• a bit of glue with the other sites out there, as seen on the left
• and ofcourse, a shoutbox. Can't do without those

Missing bits, though:

• an rss-feed. First on my priority list, but not tonight. Should be up in a few days.

• comments on the news. As said, I'm still thinking of a good news system, so until then, you won't be able to comment on the news.

  You can always use the shoutbox, but that's a bit of a shabby substitute.

This site has been tested on Firebird and IE6. I assume it will behave on Opera as well, but aren't too sure about earlier IE-versions, let alone what it looks like on other OS'es.

If it doesn't work for you, let me know and I'll see if it can be fixed.

For now, we're fresh, we're new, let's hope we're better. Now, let's see if I can finish up #13 anytime soon. || craeonics | comments (3)