Vista Skinning - The Past Year and What's Ahead

Since it has been over a year that Vista has been released, we have seen the customization of Windows Vista slowly, but surely start to take hold.  Skinning had a rough start with Vista for several reasons, but one of the main ones was that not everyone was rushing out to put Vista on their PC's.  Then of course, people had to learn how to customize Vista, which at the time it was a bit limited.  I would get so many questions on a daily basis from users from dozens of forums asking about what Stardock "had up its sleeves".

WindowBlinds 5.5 was launched in March of last year, and finally gave those users a means to change their visual styles, and even use their favorite ones from XP.  When WB 5.5 was released I heard from hundreds of users who claimed Vista will be the end of WindowBlinds because Aero is so "perfect". 

At the same time we had the .msstyle advocates drooling over a hack that allowed non-signed Vista themes to be used.  While Vista .msstyles had a brief period of popularity, people seemed to quickly lose interest in themes that were nothing but re-colored Aero mods.  That really wasn't the fault of people who were making the visual styles, it's just that the limitations of Vista really doesn't allow much beyond that.

In October we released the highly anticipated WindowBlinds 6.  While WindowBlinds 5.5 was a milestone as it started the ability to have WB skins on Vista, version 6 is what really made a bang.  This was a major step forward and brought a host of new features like a new UI, Internet Explorer 7 skinning, and one of the most exciting features.....blurred glass and transparency effects. 

Going forward with WindowBlinds we had a few updates that address some issues, plus the usual tweaks.  The beta of WindowBlinds 6.1 was released to Object Desktop subscribers this past week and introduced some upcoming features which I think some people haven't noticed.  The 6.1 beta thread is here, and lists some of the upcoming features like the ability to change Explorer backgrounds and opacity, support for additional titlebar buttons, among a few other things.

I have talked a lot about WindowBlinds, but lets not forget some of the other things we have seen through the year, and what is upcoming.  How about IconPackager?  IconPackager was another welcome addition to Vista, but Microsoft introduced some changes to icons including adding Live Folders, which is a nice feature, but has given some icon developers some trouble.   Yesterday, Frogboy posted a preview of the upcoming IconPackager 4, which as you see in the screenshots, is going to be a vast improvement.  I personally am thrilled with the new UI alone.

Along with the visual makeover, users will be able to set their live folder icons independently of the icon package.  Icon pack submissions have been slow the past few months, but I feel IP4 will give it a big boost again. 

So the year of Vista skinning has had it's ups and downs, I think this year we will finally see it start to blossom and events like the '08 GUI Champs will put even more of a charge in it.  So while I would love to tell and show you more of what is to come, you are just going to have to wait for more sneak peaks, but take my word for it, 2008 is going to be an awesome year, and it has just gotten started!

So I'd like to take this opportunity to ask  you, the community, what have you thought of Vista skinning (and XP) for the past year, and what you hope to see this year.