Hello,

They are still around, who are you looking for?

Thank you.
Basj,
Stardock Community Assistant.

Well, I am still submitting updated free Windowblinds here Einbeck43, and have Premium Themes for sale on my site ( LightStar Design - OS Customization ).  I will never quit!

Sadly, others have left the site.

I can remember when the Windowblinds gallery on this site was quite busy with new skins. People change, interest changes, and for whatever reason one wants to believe, it seems that new skins for Windowblinds just aren't on the radar anymore, with a few rare exceptions such as Lightstar's creations.  Hopefully that can change.

I find it interesting that nobody has commented, in this thread, about Stardock having cancelled the Master Themer program (which allowed theme creators such as @don5318 to create paid themes...).  The result of this decision, is that all of the skilled theme creators (with the partial exception of @LightStar, who is sporadically re-releasing his older free themes, but nothing new) have abandoned the platform entirely.

Yes, these artists *do* mostly have their own pages for marketing their products, but there is no longer any central source to check for new themes... nor can new users easily find any of the great themes that were available in the past... and @don5318 (who was my favorite creator, creating about half of all the 135 themes that I currently own) doesn't even *have* an online source for his great themes; he's just moved on to a new life.

I cannot imagine that anyone coming into WB as a new user, would be in any way impressed with the options that it offers now... I'm seriously wondering if this isn't preparation for just abandoning the product entirely at some point.

Derell Licht
WindowBlinds user since 1999

Sad but might be true Derrell, but I will never quit at least. So many WB skinners have quit sadly. 

Hi, Master LightStar !!
I'm so grateful to see you still sticking around... and thank you for providing the above link to your page, where I just found a beautiful new theme that I'd never seen before - Bejeweled ... it is now my happy desktop !!!

I just wish there was some well-known, well-documented source where all of the existing Masters could at least list their sites, if not show new content... waitaminit... isn't that what we *used* to have here ??   

And we still do.  Any and all Members are free to promote their works on Wincustomize.com and we still host them as well, as we always have done.

The only thing that did change was Stardock managing the commercial works for Masters which was never commercially viable.

The Wincustomize.com Site and Forum is for all in the Skinning Community to interact with each other and promote the Genre ...

Okay, "not commercially viable", I understand... 

However, why not at least have a pinned page somewhere, preferably on WinCustomize, that contains links to the various authors' pages, so users can find these sites??  Or does this already exist??  I haven't seen it...

It sounds like a good idea until you determine whether it's an issue with privacy and 'spam management'.  It's not Stardock's position to publish an individual's website/details.  That's solely the responsibility/prerogative of the individual...

Well, except that the WB developers *do* have a vested interest in making interesting themes available to users... as it stands now, most of the actually interesting themes that exist, are not visible on your site...

Yes, they do...and should be commended for respecting the wishes of the artists whose I.P. those skins are, to show them as regular skins or not to show them.

I see the database lists 5,597 Windowblinds as currently being hosted on Wincustomize.

Are you suggesting none of these is 'interesting'?

Well, many of those are legacy formats which don't even work properly with modern WB (though I in fact use a few of the legacy themes in single-application mode, where the absence of taskbar support does not matter)...  but beyond that... yeah... there are a small portion of the free themes that are actually creative designs, but the majority are very plain, ordinary designs that aren't much different than non-WB themes...

When WB first introduced the paid themes, I actually avoided using them; I already had a library of WB themes that I'd been using for years (since 1999, when I registered V3.3)... my attitude back then was "I already paid for WB, why should I pay again for themes that used to be free??"... but after awhile I started noticing that the paid themes often were very creative, interesting visions that went far beyond the run-of-the-mill themes, and I started buying a select few of those... a slippery slope that is hard to climb back from, at some point!!  Truth-in-advertising: I have 111 themes currently installed, and only 10 are paid themes that are listed in my Stardock records, so yeah, I guess I've mostly been working with free themes; I never *did* entirely get over the concept that a theme could cost nearly as much the original program (or more, in the case of neone6 ...)

I suppose that for new users coming in, who don't know what used to be available, they may well feel as though what they see is interesting enough, but alot has been lost.

I still don't see what it would cost you to have a pinned thread on the WB forum, where the former Masters could post and list their own sites, and update their message as locations changed in the future... that still won't recover don5318, though... he's moved on from WB, doesn't even *have* a website of his own.

You really have to give Microsoft some blame here for the changing of the times. Windows 10 is / was a very theme friendly OS. Windows 11 simply isnt. I'd go as far as to say Microsoft has kind of been unfriendly to third party's throughout Windows 11.

As far as theming and skinning goes, there is a Windows 11 problem that need addressed before themes can make a comeback on a Windows 11 device. One solution is to splice in Windows 10 parts to get many of the legacy skins working properly. But, Microsoft doesn't seem to want people using there windows 11 devices this way and is threatening the existence of several third party programs that allow windows 10 parts.

Therefore, the solution I like the best is to replace Windows 11 parts with alternatives. I.e. using an explorer alternative built to be skin friendly ect. This of course is a lot of work (going this route at some point Stardock might as well be a linux os ) , so the other alternative to this much work is to focus on other programs such as start 11 and make them as customizable as possible and I think this has been the path Stardock has taken so far.

I do think there needs to be a shift in focus somewhere at Microsoft to where they start playing more nice with third party developers.

PhoenixRising1

reply 14

You really have to give Microsoft some blame here for the changing of the times. Windows 10 is / was a very theme friendly OS. Windows 11 simply isnt. I'd go as far as to say Microsoft has kind of been unfriendly to third party's throughout Windows 11.

As far as theming and skinning goes, there is a Windows 11 problem that need addressed before themes can make a comeback on a Windows 11 device. One solution is to splice in Windows 10 parts to get many of the legacy skins working properly. But, Microsoft doesn't seem to want people using there windows 11 devices this way and is threatening the existence of several third party programs that allow windows 10 parts.

Therefore, the solution I like the best is to replace Windows 11 parts with alternatives. I.e. using an explorer alternative built to be skin friendly ect. This of course is a lot of work (going this route at some point Stardock might as well be a linux os ) , so the other alternative to this much work is to focus on other programs such as start 11 and make them as customizable as possible and I think this has been the path Stardock has taken so far.

I do think there needs to be a shift in focus somewhere at Microsoft to where they start playing more nice with third party developers.

 Well, okay... I agree with much of this... actually, I don't really agree that Windows 10 is even a developer-friendly... the last Windows that was actually developer- and user-friendly was Windows 7... I dearly wish they had just stopped development there, and focused on device drivers for new hardware... sharing between computers on local network was trivial with Win7, but has never worked consistently at all in win10... we've been forced to fall back to USB sticks to share files between machines... and I remember Stardock commenting on all the headaches that they had, getting WB to work reliably on Win10 ...

and in the meantime, we have Win12 already in the pipeline, which is guaranteed to muck things up even further... sigh...