Starting today new registers and existing users on the forum have to enter their Windows Style Builder registration email and serial key. This is for anti-piracy measures.
Thanks for understanding. -Management
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January 23rd, 2010Vista Style Builder 1.5 Released
October 18th, 2009Vista Style Builder 1.5 is now available. In this update several enhancements have been made such as:
Fixed:
- [Main] Memory leak when opening many themes.
- [Main] Search speed enhanced.
- [Main] In-memory UXTheme patcher launches correctly.
- [Main] RECT properties not being able to be edited properly.
- [Main] Property buttons disappearing after testing.
- [Main] Edit program not saving. (Fixed in 1.5.03)
- [Win7] FirstImageID set to 508 by default to prevent issues.
- [Win7] Open File Dialog not opening.
- [Win7] Search icon not showing.
Changed:
- [Main] DPI specific images and glyph images now shown in tabs above the preview area.
- [Main] Stream/Atlas generator works better for border cases resulting in smaller Streams for better system performance.
- [Win7] Classes, Parts, and States finalized.
- [Win7] Vista to Windows 7 theme porting finalized. *
Added:
- Image dimensions show in preview area.
- Basic testing mode. (Shift+Test to auto-switch to basic and test).
- Color searching in RGB or HEX. Also searches for colors in images.
- Window size, position, and state (Maximized/Restored) saving.
- Help pane saving.
- Online user-editable wiki documentation.
- Auto-open last file.
- Ability to change image editor by holding Shift and clicking the Edit button.
* Due to the “logoff” class being re-instated users may need to tweak this after importing. Also due to the major change in the TaskBand buttons, users will have to make new ones (make sure to keep the same dimensions for the image, 7 acts weird with different sized taskbar buttons).
No more comments.
June 9th, 2009Due to all the spam I’ve disabled comments. All’s good seeing how things have been going slowly and you can post in the forums if you need to. They’ll be reenabled whenever we can find a preventative measure to stop spam.
Easy to use multishell shellstyle.
April 5th, 2009Back in Vista Betas the DirectUI XML had Template ID’s for certain types of folder layouts (Generic, Documents, Photos and Videos, and Music) and they were used to specify the specific color gradients.
Windows Vista Beta showing the details pane gradient for the Generic files layout.
This was made possible in Vista by Michael at http://www.aeroxp.org/ by re-adding the Template ID’s back to their original location in the DirectUI XML file. This was good enough for most people but I have always wanted to have it in the MSStyles file. If you recall I made a blog post on how to link properties from DirectUI to the MSStyles ( http://blog.vistastylebuilder.com/?p=5 ). A more thorough explanation can be found at http://vistastylebuilder.com/forum/index.php?topic=215.0. I had tried adding the shell images to the MSStyles before and it worked but didn’t look good. It scaled horrible and didn’t look as it should.
Original attempt at having the shell images in the MSStyles file.
As you can see it doesn’t look the same. It’s faded and improperly stretched. I say that was a user error on my end. It wasn’t until today I decided to have another stab at it and hit the jackpot. Everything worked as it should have.
Shellstyle images for the Details Pane added to the MSStyles and fully tested!
That wasn’t so hard. Now to do it in Vista.
You can go ahead and grab the shellstyle for Windows 7 Build 7068 here: http://media.longhornfusion.net/vsbblog/downloads/shellstyle.dll
The properties and images are located in Explorer & Shell > Shell > PreviewPaneControl > Template:Edit > Background. (CommonItemsDialog:Edit doesn’t have it.)
You need this StyleHack: http://media.longhornfusion.net/vsbblog/downloads/ShellStyle.stylehack
AveStyler: universal uxtheme patcher
March 29th, 2009AveStyler is an in-memory uxtheme patcher that will allow you to use custom themes on Windows without replacing system files. AveStyler is the first application of this kind that supports Windows XP, Windows 2003, Windows Vista and Windows 7, all both in x86 (32bits) and x64 (64 bits) versions.
As a bonus, AveStyler comes with an application to install, delete and apply visual styles with one click of a button:
You can get AveStyler for just 3EUR (approx. 4USD) from http://www.avestyler.com .
VSB 1.4 coming soon
March 23rd, 2009There hasn’t been an update to VSB for some time now, but we have been working on version 1.4 in the last two months.
One of the most asked questions about Vista Style Builder lately, is if it will support Windows 7. While the name is Vista Style Builder, I’m happy to announce that VSB will support Windows 7 fully starting from 1.4;
On 7, Vista Style Builder will actually name itself Win7 Style Builder: http://www.win7stylebuilder.com .
Another new feature of VSB 1.4 is that it will allow you to develop and test themes on machines without patched uxtheme DLLs installed.
We hope to release 1.4 this week!
From Vista to 7. And XP too.
March 22nd, 2009There hasn’t been a post in a while and I bet you’re wondering what’s going on. Well here’s what’s been going on.
With Windows 7 getting closer to release we’ve been getting ready to support Windows 7 in VSB (Win7 Style Builder technically).
The first thing was to research everything that’s new in Windows 7’s MSStyles. There are quite a lot of changes: there are new taskbars (yes plural) and a whole new Start Menu. So I went digging around and placing everything properly in the tree – that took quite some time and those files were released with VSB 1.3.
Now that we’ve been continuously preparing we had to give all those parts names. Took a whole lot longer as I had to change things and use the Test feature (time saver) and afterwards creating the states for them. All of the new Windows 7 specifics take up a total of over 400 lines of XML.
So that’s it right? Far from it. See the point of VSB is to make theming easy. Not only that but unleash the true power of the MSStyles format. So what happens if you make a theme which took weeks and then you later upgrade to Windows 7? Well, you import your theme. That’s right, you can import your Vista themes straight to 7.
Open dialog showing ‘Import a Vista Style’
This by far took the most amount of time. Reason being is that in Windows 7 some classes have different Class Numbers. Not only that but the structure of some parts and states are very different. So I went digging to find what’s changed so the import could work. It was morework than I thought it would be but not too bad. After finding and documenting the changes I sent them to Ave. He did his magic and half a day later he got it working.
We still have some things left to map. Start Menu being the only big one. The rest such as Clock (seeing how it has a nasty bug when there aren’t properties for images.), CommandBar (Buttons are mixed up. Not major), and Search Box (Text color has been relocated is all). To test this new feature during the day I used Longhorn Fusion’s Longhorn M7 R1 theme. Call me biased but I think it’s still the most advanced theme for Windows (MSStyles).
Windows 7 with Longhorn Fusion’s Longhorn M7 R1 theme. In this shot you can also see the Clock bug as mentioned earlier.
So now most of the work is done for you. The major thing you’d have to do is if you had a custom shellstyle.dll is make a new one. I don’t know if we can get that.
Welp that’s the gist of what’s been going on. There are many other changes in this version of VSB which shouldn’t be long.
Cheers.
themeable() What it does and how you can use it.
February 23rd, 2009Continuing the DirectUI XML we come across a fiew road blocks. Mainly because it’s not documented. However with extensive testing you’re sure to find out a lot. The biggest concern over Ave and I’s mind is the themeable() function. We knew it take two parameters, but we didn’t know what the second one was for.
Last night we discussed it and couldn’t figure out what it was used for. So time goes on, and I stay up late to continue finding what it’s for. It wasn’t until this afternoon that we cracked it. After all this time we found out it was for the Classic theme. Doesn’t make sence at first but I can explain.
This example will be used for the rest of the blog entry: themeable(x, y)
If you look back at my recent post I made a mod for ExplorerFrame.dll to allow custom colors on hover, compressed, etc. When I had it set it just a theme property (x) any theme applied that didn’t have those properties caused Windows Explorer to not work. My hacky solution to that was to just create a StyleHack and add those properties to every theme including the default Aero. It became hard to do that when I went to test a theme and it was in use so it applied Aero (which at the time didn’t have the properties) so I was stuck. The only way I could get out was to go into the registry, change the applied theme, log out and then log back in. Not the most convenient thing right? Well luckily today’s research fixed that.
If you’ve ever looked closely at a property that specifies themeable() you’ll probably notice that “x” usually (sometimes it has both hard”coded” values) has a property that reads from the theme while “y” is something that’s hard”coded”. (eg. window, argb(0,0,0,0), etc). If “x” isn’t available for whatever reason then “y” will be used. Another example I’m about to show you is from my ExplorerFrame mod. In this screen below I have the old ExplorerFrame mod (left) and the default ExplorerFrame 40690.xml (right).
http://www.tehupload.com/uploads/486360dbcab3329old.png
Look at lines 1203 and 1213 of the default (right). You can see it specified a color. One being pre-defined, the other being specific. Now look at those lines on the modified file (left). As you can see it reads from the MSStyles. Now what happens when the MSStyles (if one is applied) doesn’t have that property? Explorer doesn’t know what to do so it just stops working. Now look at this next image.
http://www.tehupload.com/uploads/552260dbcab3322new.png
On the modified document (left) it now has themeable(x, y). Now when an MSStyles file (if one is applied) is missing the property or if you’re using classic it will default to “y”.
Now that that’s cleared up you’re probably still wondering “If it’s used for classic then why is it in the theme’s shellstyle.dll”. Good question. Now here’s an answer. Sometimes a window will force the classic style. (Ex. Open CMD with Basic applied in Vista.) You can also run CMD as an Administrator and run “net stop themes” without the quotations and it’ll show a classic like UI which gives a better viewing of what it does. When either of these two happen you’ll notice that the Classic interface is almost pure white with a light blue titlebar (instead of the default darker blue) and a horrible-looking border padding. This is where those “y” values in a theme’s shellstyle.dll are used.
If you have any thoughts or questions about the themeable() function the feel free to leave a comment.
-Panda
Hover, Selected, Compressed, and Encrypted colors in VSB
February 21st, 2009There are a lot of things I don’t agree with in the theming system in Windows. One being several different resources being housed into multiple DLL files along with the MSStyles file. Luckily most of these things are in XML (DirectUI XML to be precise) so we can read it and edit it.
What I’ve been doing lately is having properties from these XML files within the DLL files read from the MSStyles file to provide a central way to customize the look and feel of the UI. Microsoft is doing this as well however I doubt they’re going to get all of it.
One of the most requested “features” in theming would be to change the Explorer’s ListView Hover, Selected, Compressed, and Encrypted colors. It’s been on my to-do list all week and I decided I’d wait until the weekend to look into it. I already tested the shellstyle.dll for these colors last week. It was a no-go. So I dug into ExplorerFrame.dll and took a look at the XML files. I found the colors and sadly they were hardcoded so I had to do some theme research. In doing so I added properties to Windows 7 > Explorer & Shell > Explorer > List View > ListItem. Those properties are HEADING1TEXTCOLOR:COLOR which is for the compressed file color, HEADING2TEXTCOLOR:COLOR which is for the encrypted file color. I defaulted them to their original colors. I also added TEXTCOLOR:COLOR to Windows 7 > Explorer & Shell > Explorer > List View > ListItem > Hot to specify the hover text color of an item in explorer. I also added TEXTCOLOR:COLOR to Windows 7 > Explorer & Shell > Explorer > List View > ListItem > Selected to specify the selected text color of an item in explorer. Here’s a video of the testing of it: http://media.longhornfusion.net/Win7/Research/Win7_ExplorerFrame-Modified.swf
Note: So far I’ve only looked into doing this in Windows 7 as it’s my default OS. I’ll look into Vista tomorrow.
-Panda X
Welcome to the Vista Style Builder Blog!
February 21st, 2009Welcome to the VSB Blog, the VSB researchers and/or developers will be posting interesting how-tos, tutorials, research, and other updates.