SkinBox XP AERO GLASS emulation

[Patrice Terrier]

SkinBox (full XP AERO GLASS emulation)

This one uses the latest version of the skin engine developed for BassBox,
and it introduces a new clock control using the VISTA's gadget style.



You can dowload the zip EXE file there:
SkinBoxExe.zip

Note: the full PowerBASIC source code is available on José Roca's forum in the SDK programming section.

...

[Roger Garstang]

With blur it is still slightly choppy, but everything else seems a lot smoother than the last time I played with your Aero Demos. It would be really cool if this could be a full theme or a replacement for the XP Themes to make XP completely work like Vista, then there would be no need to go to it.

Excellent work. Now if a theme package like this is purchased and used as it is now, are all the png files and stuff required, or can this all be in one EXE and it accesses them as resources?

[Patrice Terrier]

There is no gain to embed the graphic inside of a resource .PBR, except if you don't want to allow easy customization.

But then you will need a third party DLL, like GDImage to preserve the alpha channel, and use them as binary resources inside of the EXE.

To reduce what you call "choppy" in blur mode, then you could try to disable the timer that is being used to update the display when moving the form hover animated screen sections.

Note: that there is no native BLUR mode on XP, everything must be computed in real time, perhaps writing the BLUR section in assembly could make it a little faster, but this is out of my field of expertise. On VISTA the BLUR mode is done by DirectX 10 and the DWM composited mode that is hardware accelerated.

...