Challenges of skinning in a Windows 7 world

[fhpuqrgrpgvirzhpujbj]

Windows cursors can't be animated and alpha blended. CursorFX cursors can

They can be animated and they can be alpha blended...

[_neutrino Veteran]

never really big into themeing windows 7 i think it looks fine on its own.

[Frogboy Administrators]

As a owner though, I'm sure you can see the trend over the last 5-6 years. The number of quality skins vs. mediocre. The number of windowblind purchases and the number of premium skin purchases. Hell even the number of free downloads.

Absolutely in terms of the quality. One of the problems has been the success of the Master skins. There are Master skinners who can basically make a living making just WindowBlinds skins. That has depleted the number of top skinners making "free" skins.

While you have every right to disagree, I think we can all agree theming popularity is drastically different than it was years ago.

I agree here too. I was responding to the argument that someone made that more people were using .msstyles at this point. msstyles are pretty dead and while there's a handful of them out there on deviantART and such that we link to from here at Neowin, they're not exactly setting the world on fire.

Similar how the music industry melted down due to all the crap being released. Those who release good quality music, beat the trend and sell exceptionally well. Those who go with the flow fall flat. I think what everyone is getting at is there needs to be change. The status quo isn't helping.

Here I disagree in both cases.

The music industry melted down because of piracy imo. The crap-level I think has been pretty steady. :)

Customization in general has declined on Windows because Windows Vista (and especially Windows 7) take the wind out of customization.

Windows XP was ugly and clunky. Windows 2000 before was even worse. Back then, there were popular third party shells and tons of customization programs.

There used to be a dozen or so "skinning sites". Now, the ones that are left outside of WinCustomize and the deviantART skinning sections are basically ghost towns.

I think skinning is returning to where it was in the beginning, the purvue of power users.

And as I pointed out in the videos, the challenge is that power users don't want to give up any functionality just for customization. They might be willing to tolerate flakeyness if there's something given back but customization alone isn't it.

UIS0 is a brand new skin format. But skinning Aero I think is an important first step because it allows people to customize things without any real downside.

From there, you work your way up. Stardock needs to put professional skinners on making FREE skins to show what can be done and how. It's been hard to do that so far because the market for professional skins is so big still (i.e companies wanting custom WindowBlinds skins). And those skins have to work PERFECT.

They can be animated and they can be alpha blended...

I wonder if that's a Windows 7 thing. I know previously you could have animated mouse cursors OR it could have a shadow but you couldn't do both.

CursorFX was made a long...long... time ago.

[Frogboy Administrators]

If you could create your own DWM replacement that captures calls to it, instead of forcing Aero to do things, you could really restore what people have known WindowBlinds for: very unique skins, for a very unique purpose.

Ironically, we were making our own DWM a few years back. Microsoft hired him away from us -- to make the DWM that is in Vista/Win7 (which is what he's working on now too).

WindowBlinds makes use of the DWM. The trick is application compatibility.

Here's a video:

http://screencast.com/t/ZDZhNzRlNj

[fhpuqrgrpgvirzhpujbj]

I wonder if that's a Windows 7 thing. I know previously you could have animated mouse cursors OR it could have a shadow but you couldn't do both.

CursorFX was made a long...long... time ago.

Well, I know cursorFX was made after Vista, and vista had the same Aero cursors 7 does, so...

[Frogboy Administrators]

CursorFX is the rebranding of CursorXP which in turn worked also on Windows 2000.

[Xero]

Absolutely in terms of the quality. One of the problems has been the success of the Master skins. There are Master skinners who can basically make a living making just WindowBlinds skins. That has depleted the number of top skinners making "free" skins.

I agree here too. I was responding to the argument that someone made that more people were using .msstyles at this point. msstyles are pretty dead and while there's a handful of them out there on deviantART and such that we link to from here at Neowin, they're not exactly setting the world on fire.

Here I disagree in both cases.

The music industry melted down because of piracy imo. The crap-level I think has been pretty steady. :)

Customization in general has declined on Windows because Windows Vista (and especially Windows 7) take the wind out of customization.

Windows XP was ugly and clunky. Windows 2000 before was even worse. Back then, there were popular third party shells and tons of customization programs.

There used to be a dozen or so "skinning sites". Now, the ones that are left outside of WinCustomize and the deviantART skinning sections are basically ghost towns.

I think skinning is returning to where it was in the beginning, the purvue of power users.

And as I pointed out in the videos, the challenge is that power users don't want to give up any functionality just for customization. They might be willing to tolerate flakeyness if there's something given back but customization alone isn't it.

UIS0 is a brand new skin format. But skinning Aero I think is an important first step because it allows people to customize things without any real downside.

From there, you work your way up. Stardock needs to put professional skinners on making FREE skins to show what can be done and how. It's been hard to do that so far because the market for professional skins is so big still (i.e companies wanting custom WindowBlinds skins). And those skins have to work PERFECT.

While piracy is no doubt to blame, I still believe it was the product that caused it. There are many albums that were pirated very heavily but still went 10x+ platinum. People will pay for quality even if they can get it for free. I'm no different. I've pirated music because I can get it weeks in advance, if it was good I bought the album too. I think the problem was there was nothing worth buying, hell many would delete the songs they downloaded. Before the digital era people had to buy it to see if it was good, now they don't have to, which results in much less sales.

I agree that Vista/7 removed the real 'need' for skinning but if you can top it, people will buy it. Power user or casual user, everyone like pretty graphics. One reason why Apple does so well, they have pretty with usability. Themes can do the same thing. I just found the majority of them were silly gimmicks with annoying graphics and eye sores to meet the theme's 'goal' i.e. a big dragon to fit the theme's err.. theme ;) Fancy themes don't have to fall into the flakiness category. Most do, they don't have to. With enough incentive one could easily design functional theme with a nicer face than Aero. The problem lies in creating the theme. Most cut corners, re-use same elements, same icons, same effects, leave parts unskinned ect. I'd think most of it was related to time, but skill is also a factor. You can't make a turkey dinner in 15 minutes, if you want a good meal you need to let it cook for the required time. If you want it to taste good you need to stop using the chef that keeps burning it and use one that knows how to cook. ( No more analogies promise! :) )

While some may classify them as master skins, I'm sure there are many that will disagree. You need some Jedi-Master skins ;) While the free ones are certainly far less polished the premium one's aren't very far off. There needs to be a discernible level of quality that you can easily notice between the two. At the moment those lines are blurred. While I understand this is just my opinion, I don't believe I'm alone in my thinking here. Quality, tested, perfected down to the last pixel requires hard work and time. Master skinner or not, I don't see how many can put the effort in with very little return. While you might not like this, perhaps let the designers take a larger share of the profits from selling. Might encourage them to try harder. The point I've been taking entirely too long to get across is, better themes = better sales = more money and ultimately more downloads and community activity. While you (and others) may be happy with the current one's they can be much better.

[Frogboy Administrators]

I think on the whole, we're on the same page.

The big problem I see with Vista/7 is that the threshold of quality has increased so dramatically.

There are a lot of other issues that have changed too in terms of the economics. Companies licensing the tech or contracting the top skinners keeps the best skinners constantly busy.

I was barely able to get our own skinners to work on new WindowBlinds 7 skins because they had to be taken off of projects from Dell and HP to work on them.

[Denis W. Veteran]

Ironically, we were making our own DWM a few years back. Microsoft hired him away from us -- to make the DWM that is in Vista/Win7 (which is what he's working on now too).

Not to stay offtopic for too long, but is that why development of WindowFX stalled?

I find this quite interesting. Two theming components in Windows that have their roots here. First the uxstyles that supposedly was a derivation of an older WindowBlinds, then the DWM as well.

[Tim the Enchanter]

never really big into themeing windows 7 i think it looks fine on its own.

I completely agree. I've considered using WB7 a while back but upon inspection of the themes that WB7 offers, none of them actually looks that good, certainly not worth the price of the software and theme. Since the introduction of Aero, windowblinds just doesnt seem necessary anymore. Even if I do get the urge to customize windows 7, visual styles provides more than enough flexibility.

[DukeEsquire]

I used to use WindowsBlinds when I used WindowsXP, but I haven't used it in years.

VisualStyles are much better looking, the skins don't cost money and the program doesn't cost money.

On top of that Aero is such a clean look that I really haven't been interested in finding anything else. I bet a lot of people have the same opinion as me.

Maybe WindowBlinds is like Betamax or Cassette tape. At some point, it made sense to have it, but the world has moved on and I don't see myself paying $20 for a program to skin Windows 7.

[Frogboy Administrators]

In that case of uxtheme.dll, that was a case where Microsoft looked at wblind.dll and how it worked and used the same system hook. Even today, if you look at a process, you can see that uxtheme.dll is hooked into the process where it intercepts NC_PAINT messages.

With the DWM, they simply hired our lead compositor developer which set lots of things back (since we're a small company). It set DesktopX back the most but WindowFX was affected and one project was outright canceled.

[goji]

After having read the thread, then the basic issue seems to be simple.

Similar to the gaming arena, you need to adopt a MS developer centric philosophy versus a Sony "we know you want it, so make it happen" philosophy. Very general, but so is this discussion.

If there were more incentives for more creative people to jump on the skin creation bandwagon then quite possibly demand would increase, but then again as a lay person, I see no reason to; with Xero on this one.

[fhpuqrgrpgvirzhpujbj]

I was under the impression that CursorFX was modified a good amount from CursorXP because it didn't work on Vista? And that still doesn't justify claiming a competitor doesn't have a featue they do have (whether purposeful or not).

And claiming that use of hooking the Paint message proves Microsoft copied Windowblinds is jumping to conclusions a bit considering its a fairly logical place to do that kind of drawing.

[hdood]

The WindowBlinds home page doesn't do a very good job of promoting it. Are the five skins shown on it supposed to be the creme de la creme? I ask because they don't look very good. It's sort of like being transported back to the 90s. Some even look outright unprofessional.

[Frogboy Administrators]

I was under the impression that CursorFX was modified a good amount from CursorXP because it didn't work on Vista? And that still doesn't justify claiming a competitor doesn't have a featue they do have (whether purposeful or not).

And claiming that use of hooking the Paint message proves Microsoft copied Windowblinds is jumping to conclusions a bit considering its a fairly logical place to do that kind of drawing.

The original author claimed that CursorFX was stealing features from Windows when, in fact, it had said features first. That was the context of my statement.

CursorFX is CursorXP re-branded since it didn't make sense to call it CursorXP when it ran on XP and Vista.

I will have to check and see if you can do in Windows 7 what you can do in CursorFX. Perhaps you can point me to a cursor site that has mouse cursors of the caliber that are available for CursorFX.

And claiming that use of hooking the Paint message proves Microsoft copied Windowblinds is jumping to conclusions a bit considering its a fairly logical place to do that kind of drawing.

Oh please.

First, we've talked to enough people at Microsoft at the time to know they were doing this.

Second, no, doing a system hook in the exact way we did it is not the "logical" place someone would do it. Back in the day, there were several skinning programs out there (eFX and Chroma for example) and each had its own way. The OS maker shouldn't even need to be doing system hooks. A system hook is something you do if you don't have access to the source code.

[fhpuqrgrpgvirzhpujbj]

The original author claimed that CursorFX was stealing features from Windows when, in fact, it had said features first. That was the context of my statement.

CursorFX is CursorXP re-branded since it didn't make sense to call it CursorXP when it ran on XP and Vista.

I will have to check and see if you can do in Windows 7 what you can do in CursorFX. Perhaps you can point me to a cursor site that has mouse cursors of the caliber that are available for CursorFX.

I was the original author of that statement, I was not saying anyone stole features from anyone else, I was simply saying that Windows has indeed supported Alpha blending and animation for more then 3 years, and that I'd expect Stardock would have realized that after that long. The only reason I can't give you a cursor site with ones as good as CursorFX is because as I complained about earlier, too many people make cursors just for CursorFX (although they use nothing that Windows alone doesn't support). I could easily use my extractor and create Cur versions of any 'high-caliber' cursorFX cursor you can find. (Another thing the CursorFX site is wrong about btw, it claims the original PNGs can't be extracted.

Edited December 15, 2009 by omnicoder

[DukeEsquire]

The WindowBlinds home page doesn't do a very good job of promoting it. Are the five skins shown on it supposed to be the creme de la creme? I ask because they don't look very good. It's sort of like being transported back to the 90s. Some even look outright unprofessional.

Yeah I agree.

http://www.stardock.com/products/windowblinds/

Four of the five skins being showcased in the banner look terrible and the fifth is just an outdated OSX knockoff. I would not want to use any of them. I imagine the majority of people using computers want an interface that "fades" in the computer environment, not one that screams at you with bright colors and bulky buttons.

That's why the GUI of both Windows and OSX have moved towards transparency. Not only does it look cool, but it blends away and makes whatever you're doing easier to concentrate on.

[Xero]

^ Too much transparency and it becomes distracting. I think Windows use is overdone. I like the subtleness of OSX. Just enough but not too much :)

[Frogboy Administrators]

I was the original author of that statement, I was not saying anyone stole features from anyone else, I was simply saying that Windows has indeed supported Alpha blending and animation for more then 3 years, and that I'd expect Stardock would have realized that after that long. The only reason I can't give you a cursor site with ones as good as CursorFX is because as I complained about earlier, too many people make cursors just for CursorFX (although they use nothing that Windows alone doesn't support). I could easily use my extractor and create Cur versions of any 'high-caliber' cursorFX cursor you can find. (Another thing the CursorFX site is wrong about btw, it claims the original PNGs can't be extracted.

That seems like quite a cop out imo.

As for what Stardock does or doesn't know, I'm not directly involved on CursorFX. It's not part of Object Desktop so I don't follow it very closely. Feel free to put up your own CursorFX theme up as a converted .CUR file and I'll happily check it out.

I do know that CursorFX allows users to do things like increase the size of the mouse cursor on the fly.

Given that CursorFX is free, complaining that artists prefer it to Windows mouse cursors doesn't strike any point I can think of. It's not like users are deprived of something and if they are, rather than complaining they could simply start making their own mouse cursors or paying artists to make mouse cursors or setting up a site to support mouse cursors or whatever.

[Rafael]

I want to address a few themes that have arisen in the thread:

Uxtheme.dll patching

If you're still manually patching Uxtheme.dll on Windows 7, you're wasting your time. Download my UxStyle application. It's free.

UIS0 + Hybrid work

I applaud the commitment to increased compatibility over fit n' finish. Even as an author of just a glorified patcher, we've run into this as well. 3rd party msstyles are plagued with numerous compatibility issues that we get blamed for. It'll be nice to return to a stable platform. The name UIS0 sucks though, imo. I suggest using UIS Compat. or something without a numeric nomenclature, to distinguish it between UIS 1 and 2, which are perceptively (not factually) "newer and better".

Beta Feedback

I've seen and run my share of "external betas". Simply put, they have very little return and aren't worth the hassle. Everyone here advocating for a free WindowBlinds beta is doing so for the sole purpose of obtaining freebies. In reality, users are dumb and lazy. To put things into perspective, I was chatting with some Microsoft folk and I believe they mentioned receiving a single digit percentage of actionable feedback from the entire Windows 7 beta group.

Cursor argument

Moot. The software is free, move on.

[Subject Delta]

The reason that Microsoft receive a small percentage of actionable feedback from their beta testers is because practically everything that gets submitted gets put into the "Won't Fix" category, or just gets completely ignored. I filed a bug about how unstable and crashy the nVidia raid drivers are, and having looked around google it seems loads of people have the same problem, as nVidia's raid drivers frankly suck, yet they ignored me and the drivers still made it into the final release.

As for the rest of this thread, I mainly stay out of it because I just use the standard Windows 7 theme as I find it looks nice enough for my use, but its kind of sad to see an Administrator as a person who should be looked up to going on the offensive because people have uncomplimentary opinions about their software. If you want to ban someone for obvious flaming, fair enough, but I haven't really seen anything in this thread that constitutes that.

[Unrealistic]

What would be typical of me would be to ban your account for being an ass.

I'll say this just once (since I have my posting rights back :rolleyes: ). As stated in my PM to you, you called yourself a basta*d which even we are not allowed to say, then threatened to ban me, while calling me an ass. You are just as wrong and took the wrong direction in defending your products. This will be the only thing I say though regarding yourself. Everything else will be discussing Stardock.

He says people don't want to pay for having different enhancements to Aero. He's certainly entitled to his opinion. But I disagree.

WindowBlinds does plenty of major skinning to the OS.

I am simply spelling out what I think are issues it has to address in an age where Windows 7 looks pretty damn good out of the box.

Re: Multiple Monitors

One of his points "multiple monitor support" is simply nonsense. He's referring to WindowBlinds skinning a third-party tool's taskbar extender which is a different issue. He could just easily be talking to the developers of that program.

Every developer here uses multiple monitors with WindowBlinds without a problem.

Re: What "people prefer"

I love Neowin (obviously) and the community but there's never been even remotely a comparison in the user population between WindowBlinds users and people using msstyles even when taking into account the fact that uxtheme patching is free.

But there's no way to "prove" that. I simply disagree.

Fences is a freeware program and today we released Fences Pro. We'll see how well Fences Pro sells. If Fences Pro does incredibly well, then I'd argue that maybe Stardock should loosen up on the shareware version of WindowBlinds.

- You may disagree and obviously have sale references to backup your claims, but I still believe that most people would prefer your Aero-derivatives free and would like new, original themes instead. The real problem is Master Skinners want to be paid for their work, and when Stardock pays them to create themes for them, based off Aero, they are going to do that. Business is business and I understand and respect the community, however just because you are putting money into something, doesn't necessarily mean your company should charge for it. I understand you are still a relatively small company and do not have unlimited income, but even then, maybe you should give back to the community.

- I have contacted the developers actually and tried to get them to contact Stardock. As per the developer(s), they have stated that communication from Stardock is not ideal. Whether or not this is true is another discussion, but I have contacted them. Your Aero UIS0 themes work perfectly with these programs and so do ALL Visual Styles, so clearly it is your program that doesn't work. In your own videos you state that "power users do not want to sacrifice usability for ANY application" and then on here, you trivialize my point and say other people do not have these problems. It's this dissonance and flip flopping that anger me the most. You changed your point because I had a problem with it. At the very least, I would love to see proper wallpaper support for multiple monitors, including the ability to have different wallpapers on each monitor. To my knowledge, the trial version of 7 didn't include any options like that and it was very disappointing.

- I still agree the Windowblinds gives more value than Visual Styles, however as of late, that value is either underrated or has been lowered in value because of the points you brought up...incompatibility.

- Fences is an amazing product and I use it. I haven't tried the trial of Fences Pro, but I will definitely give it a shot and if it offers even more features, I will purchase it. I have always used Object Dock Free because the pro features have never been compelling enough to purchase it. As I stated earlier however, I am not telling you to give it away for free, I am simply stating to give a beta or release candidate for free to give users an opportunity to send you feedback. You could limit functionality after a date, just as Microsoft's Operating system works.

-There was a conversation on the Wincustomize forums where a certain Master Skinner was caught using other works from people from DeviantArt (and not giving any credit to the original authors), and some of her Master Skins were taken offline and then re-uploaded as free. Your moderator team released a note on this particular thread that stated that her work was NOT Master Skin quality and if she continued to do things like this, she would lose her status. This is exactly what I'm talking about. The community had to bring this all up to Stardock for your team to do something about it. Granted, you resolved the issue, but if you are going to charge for themes, there needs to be a higher standard, especially for Master Skinners.

All 3 of us own it.

I think it's safe to say that I get my share of criticism. I'll debate any topic.

I just don't like it getting personal.

If Bill and Bob disagree on some product, it doesn't mean Bob is stupid or out of touch or what not.

Similarly, I won't say what people "should" or "shouldn't" have to pay for. Only individuals can decide what they would or wouldn't pay for.

People paid for Style XP for years and it did nothing that you couldn't get for free. But others found it convenient and who am I to say whether their choice was wrong or not?

TGTSoft was a horrible company. :) Stardock is not. I may criticize the company, but it because I want it to continue to succeed. I do not want it to fail. I will say their choice was wrong, because even then, your product offered everything their product did and much more.

Absolutely in terms of the quality. One of the problems has been the success of the Master skins. There are Master skinners who can basically make a living making just WindowBlinds skins. That has depleted the number of top skinners making "free" skins.

I agree here too. I was responding to the argument that someone made that more people were using .msstyles at this point. msstyles are pretty dead and while there's a handful of them out there on deviantART and such that we link to from here at Neowin, they're not exactly setting the world on fire.

Customization in general has declined on Windows because Windows Vista (and especially Windows 7) take the wind out of customization.

Windows XP was ugly and clunky. Windows 2000 before was even worse. Back then, there were popular third party shells and tons of customization programs.

There used to be a dozen or so "skinning sites". Now, the ones that are left outside of WinCustomize and the deviantART skinning sections are basically ghost towns.

I think skinning is returning to where it was in the beginning, the purvue of power users.

And as I pointed out in the videos, the challenge is that power users don't want to give up any functionality just for customization. They might be willing to tolerate flakeyness if there's something given back but customization alone isn't it.

UIS0 is a brand new skin format. But skinning Aero I think is an important first step because it allows people to customize things without any real downside.

From there, you work your way up. Stardock needs to put professional skinners on making FREE skins to show what can be done and how. It's been hard to do that so far because the market for professional skins is so big still (i.e companies wanting custom WindowBlinds skins). And those skins have to work PERFECT.

- Master Skinners can still make a living if you continued to pay them for the themes they create for your company, and release them for free. I'm not sure exactly how your payment system works exactly, but I do know a rough approximation of what you pay certain Master Skinners. This is the joy of beta testing their themes for years. :). Also, I would like to point out, that I am just as harsh to their themes as I am being towards you. It is in no way an honest attack on you, but on the products you are releasing. I am not here to make enemies, but to maybe give you a different view on your products.

- As you have said multiple times and so have others, the reason customization has truly died, is because Aero for Vista and Windows 7 is honestly quite amazing. I also remember that when Vista was being released, you said on PowerUser.TV, that Microsoft was making it harder for Stardock to skin certain elements. From what I hear on Skin Studio, there other problems which your skinners have issues with. These however are slowly being rectified by your main programmer for Skin Studio. The main problem is though, keeping programs intact and not causing issues. You are definitely taking the right approach now, but it will take time to get the community back. I do commend you on your current job and I am glad you are back as Project Manager. I think the more you work on it again, the vision will become clearer as to how you want Windowblinds/Skin Studio to continue.

Ironically, we were making our own DWM a few years back. Microsoft hired him away from us -- to make the DWM that is in Vista/Win7 (which is what he's working on now too).

WindowBlinds makes use of the DWM. The trick is application compatibility.

Didn't know this one. How unfortunate.

I think on the whole, we're on the same page.

The big problem I see with Vista/7 is that the threshold of quality has increased so dramatically.

There are a lot of other issues that have changed too in terms of the economics. Companies licensing the tech or contracting the top skinners keeps the best skinners constantly busy.

I was barely able to get our own skinners to work on new WindowBlinds 7 skins because they had to be taken off of projects from Dell and HP to work on them.

The other issue is convincing your top skinners to actually use Windows 7 over XP. I know of a few skinners who hate both Vista and Windows 7 simply because of the limited customization options. I'm still trying to convince them to drop XP though. This is definitely a big hurdle.

I want to address a few themes that have arisen in the thread:

Beta Feedback

I've seen and run my share of "external betas". Simply put, they have very little return and aren't worth the hassle. Everyone here advocating for a free WindowBlinds beta is doing so for the sole purpose of obtaining freebies. In reality, users are dumb and lazy. To put things into perspective, I was chatting with some Microsoft folk and I believe they mentioned receiving a single digit percentage of actionable feedback from the entire Windows 7 beta group.

If I wanted freebies, I would pirate the software. In reality, users are dumb and lazy, however as has been stated multiple times, the users in question here are Power Users. These are the people that can help design/build software and want to see it grow. Sure, not everyone will give the same amount of feedback, but there are times when those 1-2 suggestions can greatly improve software and make them even better.

Microsoft are just now adding Tabbing messaging to Windows Live Messenger. I believe as a beta tester over 5 or 6 years ago I asked for that feature and it was put on hiatus. Microsoft doesn't always listen and their idea of "actionable" is probably not the same as our idea.

If someone actually reads through all of this post I commend them.

[+SOOPRcow MVC]

First, before there was WindowBlinds, there was no GUI skinning in Windows. So I'm not sure who is copying who here.

Wasn't EFX around before WindowBlinds?

[Guest xiphi]

I agree with Rafael that most people are more interested in a freebie than they are giving actual feedback. Proof of that is the number of people who wanted to remove the "Send Feedback" links that were all over the Windows 7 Beta. I took advantage of the Feedback tool, but, unfortunately, it seems I was just a minority in that regard. So, in the end, is it really worth going through the trouble to offer a public beta if only a small percentage are willing to give feedback? I wouldn't blame anyone if they choose to keep beta's closed. Granted, the situation is different with MS than it is for Stardock since MS has multiple ways of getting feedback.

As for Vista/7 3rd party themes, I've yet to see anything that looks as good or better than Aero and wasn't a derivative of it. Most seem half-baked, and never get finished, which is disappointing.