There are more Windows versions of the Blackbox shell than trees in a forest. That's not a bad thing though, as Blackbox is also one of the few shells that sees some actual developement these days. The ‘latest’ branch is a mod of bbLean 1.16, dubbed bbLean 1.16z(eytok).

“I love bblean, but I think some small thing can be change to do bblean more personalizable. That's why, I made some modification.

changes in bblean 1.16:

• menu icons support

• menu icons size selection

• icons affectation syntaxe (like bbleanmod)

• separator (UPDATE)

• scroller position inversed to not hide icons (left<->right)

• support of big icons of tasks for bbleanbar

• Shadow (position and color)

• "blackbox.contextmenu.itemAdjust" no more need (NEW)

changes in bbleanbar:

• replace "smallicon" by "icon.size"

• clock's tooltips

• separation of task's and tray's saturation and hue

• Shadow

• workspace and clock label have independant size

changes in bbleanskin:

• icons support in label frame

• titlebar of "unskinnable" windows use style color (and look better when maximize windows)

• selection object (menu, etc...) can use style color (like for tooltips)”

Since its first appearance, a month ago, patches have appeared throughout the thread, so you'll need do a bit of good old hunter/gathering to get everything.

Kudos, as usual, to sryo, by way of bb4win.org. || craeonics | comments (1)

Quite a surprise. From the days of yore, two-and-a-half years after the last release, suddenly emerges a new build of the, once quite popular, skinnable audio player, CoolPlayer.

And umm, it doesn't really add anything worth mentioning. A lot of under the hood things mainly. Prime thing to note is that CoolPlayer these days (the last few years) has OGG Vorbis support. Which is a big step up from the garbledness that is MP3. If you can hear the differences (and use the right encoder), that is.

The big question ofcourse is, can CoolPlayer still compete with the big boys? Its major restriction has always been its lack of plugin support. But wait! What does my eye spot? It can handle WinAmp input plugins? Ah, then there's hope still. || craeonics | comments

ShapeShifter liberates Mac users worldwide from OS X' excuse for an interface, by skinning the complete interface. This 2.4 release is a universal binary (meaning it'll run on both CPU-architectures), supports packs/themes from CandyBar and ThemePark and comes with a built-in editor, guiTweak.

• “ShapeShifter and guiTweak are now Universal Binaries!

• ShapeShifter now requires Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" or newer.

• ShapeShifter now supports windows with a "Unified" toolbar. These are windows which are draggable by the entire toolbar, yet are not metal windows.

• ShapeShifter now supports "Application" iContainers.

• "Small Square Buttons" are now themed properly.

• guiTweak sliders now update as you drag them.

• The ShapeShifter preference pane now uses much less system memory while loaded.

• Large-scale speed improvement when generating a new guiTweaked theme.”

And aside from ShapeShifter, its companion cursor skinning app, Mighty Mouse came out of beta as well and now has support for CursorXP themes.

Both apps are shareware, ShapeShifter kicking in at $20, while Mighty Mouse is $10. || craeonics | comments

You may or may not know that Tek is hosted by Virtual Plastic these days. Some time ago, the high chief of rubber himself, plastic, was approached by our host. I wasn't there, but in my mind it went something like this:

<host> Dude, want to move to a PHP5 platform?
<plastic> Umm, okay.
* plastic realises he's not alone on this server
<plastic> Dude, we're moving to a new server!
<craeonics> Joy.

So there. We've moved from PHP4 to 5 and I'm a lazy coder, so there's bound to be something broken somewhere still. Then again, 404's work miracles against spammers. || craeonics | comments (27)