WB6 is going to be a hard sell for Vista.

Published on October 8, 2007 By Species157 In

WindowBlinds was a major improvement over the bland UI in XP so we put up with a lot of display anomalies and conflicts. However it really only offers variety over Vista’s Aero.

After installing WB6 in Vista64 there were the usual dozen or so apps that I had to tell WB6 to ignore to prevent problems. And what sucks with that in vista is some of these apps now use standard windows 98 UI, a huge step back. It would not let an anti-spam module from Eset load and completely erased the title bar in Thumbs plus 7, even after I set it to ignore TP7. Performance was much slower than aero with fly out menus taking 3 or 4 seconds to open compared to instantly in aero.

Even when WB 4 & 5 were mature apps I still had numerous ignored apps and display anomalies especially at 1600 x 1200 but it was so much better than XP so I put up with it. My tolerance for this is going to be much lower with Vista so SD has a lot of work to do to make WB6 worth it.

Comments

boodahbellie

on Oct 08, 2007

This is one reason I have yet to upgrade to vista. I really want to get the Dreams Packages, but at the cost of productivity? I think not.

GregII

on Oct 08, 2007

What cost? Works perfectly.

ZubaZ

on Oct 08, 2007

I think as 64bit gains market share (and it will, but slowly) WB and the other SD apps will get more 64bit love. We'll have to wait and see.

vStyler

on Oct 08, 2007

to make WB6 worth it.

you mean ALL of the 18 cent a day they charge?

You cant possibly expect WB to skin every obscure app on the planet perfectly. Best thing is submit any anomalies you find to support and hope they can fix in future updates. I'd rather have a few apps unskinned and the rest skinned nicely than to run Aero on all of em. I'd venture to say that's a majority vote here too. I fully understand where your coming from but when they build a perfect application, I'd like to see it.

Neil Banfield

on Oct 08, 2007

Please do report any problems you encounter so we can look into them.

What apps are using the 9x UI?

Due to the much smaller install base of Vista 64 bit, there may be a greater chance of having a problem on that OS.

We are aware of a potential problem with upgrading a 5.x install on Vista 64 bit as a key file does not always get replaced. Symptoms of this are all 64 bit apps are unskinned. If you do have that problem then just uninstall WB, reboot (important) and then check that no wbload.dlls are left in the \windows\system32 or \windows\syswow64 folders. Then reinstall WB.

Neil Banfield

on Oct 08, 2007

As an update to this, I just installed the trial of Thumbs Plus 7 on 64 bit Vista and the titlebar is painting perfectly.

Species157

on Oct 08, 2007

you mean ALL of the 18 cent a day they charge?

I meant whether it’s worth the hassle not the money.

I expect it to function as well as Aero. How does the aero UI manage not to conflict with so many programs?

I’ve been using WB since version 3 so I am disappointed that it’s not better now but I haven’t given up. Hopefully they will iron out enough bugs to make it better than aero.

What apps are using the 9x UI?

Windows Classic.

As an update to this, I just installed the trial of Thumbs Plus 7 on 64 bit Vista and the titlebar is painting perfectly.

I had to uninstall WB6 to get the title bar back. even with the per app setting set to ignore it would not display properly with WB installed.

Species157

on Oct 10, 2007

I tried to clean up and installing again with no change. It still has numerous display bugs most are random like blank menus and explorer windows, some static like a thumbs plus transparent title bar even with WB set to ignore the app. I’ve tried re-installing TP no change. I don’t understand if it’s set to not skin TP why it’s affecting it at all.

I must add that TP and WB have always had conflicts for me even with older versions of both apps and on several different computers. Setting WB to ignore has always solved the issues in the past.

Neil Banfield

on Oct 10, 2007

Could you capture screenshots of these menu & explorer window issues?

Thumbsplus was working perfectly for me in testing, so there must a difference between our pcs.

c242

on Oct 10, 2007

That problem looks familiar, I even had that with PSPad on 32-bit once in a while.It disappeared after some beta biold of PSPad, so I'd say blame TP for that.

DorkCoffeez

on Oct 10, 2007

Should you run into any kind of skinning error we are always glad to hear of them. You get faster and more thorough results for the one on one with our support line.

Also just as a point of logic like everything else in the world we will all eventually get tired of looking at one thing for too long. Some people praise Areo but most are already sick of it. Since WB works so well and anyone can customize what is very personal to them I think the sell has great value. I know this is only the simplest part of the argument but I feel it is the more potent.

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