As noted on Virtual Plastic, pogrelz is back from the dead in his current incarnation of ‘Matthew Malensek’, with a (somewhat) brand-spanking new app: 3RVX.

“3RVX is a skinnable volume controller and display that supports alpha-blended skins, cool fade effects, drive eject notification, and a lot more. It was originally developed to emulate the Mac OS X volume bezel on Windows, but has evolved to support more options and features.”

And it comes with the cryptic message that the .NET framework may be required to run this app. I'd go as far and say that it requires 2.0. Regardless, it looks pretty good. || craeonics | comments (7)

“Andywho?”, I hear you say, which just illustrates the current state of the 'Step (yes, we are entering LiteStep territory here). Andymon is not only the big kahuna of LS-Universe, but also just about the most productive LS module developer these days. Sometimes it even seems as if all LiteStep development would come to a halt if not for him.

Not that this is anything new. LiteStep's been going through cycles like this for years now.

Anyhow, fellow 'Stepper fractal.design had a little talk with him back in November last year, to find out who we're dealing with here and what his thoughts are on 'Step related matters, and put it up a couple of weeks ago.

Which just goes to show that I'm not the only slacker around here. || craeonics | comments (2)

A couple of days ago StarDock released WindowBlinds 5.1. WindowBlinds being, ofcourse, the only remaining window skinner, aside from Redmond's built-in attempt. 5.1 adds time-based automatic wallpaper changing along with the usual performance and compatibility enhancements.

“Stardock has released a new version of its popular Windows skinning utility, WindowBlinds. WindowBlinds is a program that enables users to completely change the look and feel of the entire Windows user interface — title bars, push buttons, scrollbars, the Start bar, and more.

WindowBlinds 5.1 includes new wallpaper changing functionality allowing users to provide a series of wallpapers that can change by the time of day or other criteria specified by the user. It also includes months of updates to enable WindowBlinds skins to be more compatible on software that has its own unusual interface controls along with faster performance. WindowBlinds 5.1 works on Windows XP in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions.”

Time-based wallpaper changing is an old idea, but this is the first time I've ever seen it implemented anywhere. I don't know how smooth it works here, but you can imagine things like seemless transitions from day to night wallpapers as the day passes. Ideally your skin would also gradually change, but that perhaps is something for future versions. || craeonics | comments (3)