Just wanted to get your attention ..i love black box but the thing is i live in darkness and when i have to open for example a text document or a windows application ...''im blinded by the light'' is there any way i can have black box as my soul operating system for my intire computer..in other words i want every thing on my computer to match up with xob...

thank you for your time...

Use a style with a 3dc. Search for 3dc here on the forums and you *should* find some discussion.

OMG! Fatman kills you!

Seriously, no attention grabbing subjects please. All posts get attention. Just state clearly the topic of your post and everyone will love you.



Unfortunately there is no stable way to do this. A good attempt was made by uzer, Mortar and a few others to skin windows. Two attempts actually, BBWinSkin and BBLeanSkin. But the concept is flawed. It's based on a slightly dodgy hack which basically means redirecting window messages to a skinning engine.

Without going into detail...

It's dodgy because if anything slightly unusual happens during the normal course of a window's message processing, such as a hack, the skinning engine will not handle it properly. Any app that crashes therefore crashes the skinning engine. Since the skinning engine is dead, the message processor for every skinned window is also dead, and so this crashes every skinned window. To prevent this, the skinning engine needs a bulletproof exception handler so that it can recover instead of crashing. I believe uzer was working on this, but he disappeared a while ago.

A more stable approach might be to replace the operating system's window drawing DLLs. Then there is no need to redirect the window message processing, and a single crash will not disrupt every program running. But we haven't seen this yet because it's seriously complicated.

Not to mention it would require some reverse engineering, most likely

I prefer women

Yeah, probably not documented. Mind you, look at the number of people attempting msgina.dll replacements. Actually, look at WindowBlinds. IIRC that's exactly how WindowBlinds works.



How do you know Mason isn't a woman?

no mason is a man haha..thank you all for your responses though it does suck that i have to deal with windows

To a certain degree, all of windows could look like blackbox.. that is if people were willing to re-write all of the software.. But that's not realistic... lol

But a few apps and utilities shows this could be done. .NET even gives the ability to use gradient and gdi effects on its forms and text.. though I havent really tried it at this point.

Now if there was a way to create a windowsblind skin that could read blackbox style files and color controls with those, it would be cool.. but I doubt Stardock would ever do anything like that.

Mortar high fives Fatman


Mostly agree with that. I still beleave it is possible, but it would be quite an undertaking. Let's say for buttons, one would have to find all the window IDs (and other hacks to identify windows) for Windows API, MS-MFC, and most of the major 3rd party abstraction of GUI's, wxWidgets, etc. The ground work is there within bbleanskin, but the amount of research required is a little daunting.



Hey now . It did not really work like that. Mostly, it was stripped down code to no longer use bmp's but instead hook the windows and replace their draw functions, ...mostly. The original windows draw functions looked quite similar before they got replaced. For bbwinskin, lots of error checks for different window types still needed to be added. BBWinSkin in my opinion never got past prototype stage, though much of what bbleanskin is, came from the work done on BBWinSkin. In fact, they work in pretty much the same way, except bblean skin has all the error checks and special ways of dealing with the weird windows. Grischka is a much better coder than me. Wish my code could look as pretty as his.

Anyway, point being... BBLeanSkin could be worked on to also use the types of window checks it already does, but add buttons, scrollbars, etc. Each would have to be categorized and handled for the different types of window API's.

Old topic, but for those who are still curious...
Notepad2 is a great replacement for the standard Notepad. It even allows you to use transparency, so that can help you get past some of the brightness.
Some of the most popular programs out there like Mozilla Firefox have lots of skins available. Still, you're dependent on the style scheme of each website. I guess you could tinker with each site's CSS via I dunno, Firebug, but that would take forever. Still, a decent skin should help somewhat.

Did someone somehow find the sourcecode for Chroma? I would love to have that level of control on my windoze.

Why does everyone in this thread seem convinced it's impossible to skin windows?

It is clearly possible to change the colours of all programs (notepad, word etc.) through skins.

Windows XP has built in skinning support, but it seems to have been disabled for non-microsoft skins. Fortunately, this is easy to hack around using a hacked uxtheme.dll file.

There's a load of decent XP themes at customize.org, including a lot of dark ones which you seem to have been searching for.

As for stability, it's never caused any crashes for me. It doesn't seem to eat up any memory (a major reason I wanted to avoid any 3rd party skin software) and there exists freeware which will let you make your own skins.

Yeah, i think don't really know if i prefer women actually...




_________________
aluminum plate