Soft District

WindowBlinds 6.0 is a utility that allows you to give your Windows desktop a new style by choosing from thousands of various skins, downloadable from WindowBlinds website.

Also, if you create your own personalized skin you will add more functionality with the new buttons from the title bar which can be roll-up buttons, link buttons, program short cut buttons, or media player controls.
Stardock, its developer, specialized in customizing the look and feel of Windows, added WindowBlinds special skins which can make your Windows look like your favorite car, sports and many other favorites.
Take control of your GUI and change the wallpapers, GUI color, choose a new taskbar and Start button.
And don't worry about the memory usage, because the program has the latest hardware acceleration features of modern video cards.

Though, i have encountered some problems while trying it and i hope that it won't happen to you too.
Maybe it's my Windows' fault.
When i was dragging and dropping windows on my desktop, using one of the skins available, the window's margins came after the main window, with a delay.
And when i was uninstalling the program, windows got blocked and i had to restart.

And here is the list of summarized features:

• New start menu animation support
• Category filtering on skins in wbconfig
• Tag filtering on wallpapers in wbconfig
• Random skin support
• The ability to save a re-coloring of a skin as a preset
• Advanced HSL re-coloring where you pick a single color and a range in a skin and you can just change that color instead of the entire skin
• Ability to edit the system colors from wbconfig
• Ability to change skin fonts from wbconfig
• Ability to control transparency and blur on start menu, menus, taskbar & window frames. Has some limitations on XP
• Ability to save such changes as a preset
• Vista-Ize me function which sets some defaults to have a more vista like look
• Ability to skin the sidebar
• Ability to edit a sidebar skin from within wbconfig
• Improved WB skin install when handling upgrades of skins
• Ability to alter the mouse over animation speed
• Ability to alter the default button pulsing speed
• Support for explorer background bitmaps
• Ability to use the Aero frames with the rest of the skin
• Blur support in title bars (and menus on vista)
• Lots of new sections for new Vista specific parts
• Including IE navigation arrows, IE tabs, start menu shutdown/lock buttons
• Skins virtually every aspect of the Windows GUI
• Clean and easy configuration dialog.
• Tons of configuration options for users
• Animation supported on title bars, buttons, and many other elements.
• Change the color of any visual style on the fly
• Per-application visual styles
• Doesn't alter any system files
• Safe, reliable way to change the look and feel of Windows

As system requirements you’ll need to have Windows 2003/XP/Vista, 1GHz processor, 120MB free space, 256MB RAM, and DirectX 8 or later compatible video card is necessary for per-pixel alpha-blended skins.
WindowBlinds 6.0 is a component of Object Desktop software but you can separately for just $19.95.
The trial does not include all features from the full version.

From the collection of "small but tough” I will present to you today the ConvertXtoDVD program that has been designed to help you convert your favorite video files into DVD-compatible files. If you wish to create a short video presentation that needs to be transcoded into a DVD, this is the right software for you.

As soon as I looked at the interface I liked the simple and yet subtle design that works wonderfully with the Vista Aero shell. Under each menu there are various access points to multiple settings. You can look into the General Settings, Language, Chapters, (DVD) Menu, TV Format, Burning, Subtitles, Audio, Encoding and Image Processing. In the General Settings menu you can set the working location and the program interface theme. It is really nice to see that this program, unlike so many others, has a menu that can be set into very many languages (it’s quite international, really!). In the Menu panel you can set the DVD title and playback options, while in the TV Format section, you will be given 2 choices – the video standard and the screen size. As soon as you load a video file, you can have a preview and also tweak the output file.

Applicability: The ConvertXtoDVD supports the following video input formats: AVI, Mpeg, Mpeg4, DivX, Xvid, MOV, WMV, WMV HD, DV, MKV, DVD and even more, while among the audio supported formats there are AC3, DTS, PCM, OGG and MP3. The program offers the possibility of video format choice: NTSC, PAL, or automatic and PULL-DOWN. You can even create automatic chapters, edit your own or just simply work on the DVD menu features.

Pro(s): I was pleased with the variety of options offered by this French piece of software, and it is a good thing that it works very well under Windows Vista (it also accepts the HD video files – so that’s a bonus).

Con(s): Although it is quite powerful for a small program, I wouldn’t suggest it for professional video editing and processing because it does not feature more options for a proper customization of the output video.

Official website

Buy: $39.99

Download Trial

The digital photography has set a new trend around the world some time ago, especially with the development of small and quite effective cameras, “hidden” even in the latest mobile phone devices that are quite popular at the moment. The problem is that the quality is not always the one that we want, but we can however use various image editing tools to improve the images on various adjustment levels. Since Photoshop is famous but complicated for average users, ACD See Photo Editor comes as a very handy and simple solution.

With a wide range of tools that are quite visible and accessible in the menus from the upper side of the main interface or from the right side. From the start, I will say that the Editor has been adapted and built to support Windows Vista (it is certified) and it does have a lot of “How-To” guides in it so that you will not need additional documentation in order to find out how to make the most of it.

  

Among the tools meant to enhance and modify your images, you can have a look at the Adjustment/Filter variations (up to 8 unique previews of the original photo, in each being presented the effect, filter or adjustment beforehand so that you can see how the picture will look like once you applied the tool), Batch Editing (you can apply a custom set of effects to a group of images in one go), the Vignette Tool (helps you in creating portrait-style images), the Cookie Cutter tool (cropping images into various shapes), the Auto-adjustment Tools, which are completed by the Repair tool, along with text insertion support and gradient pre-sets of colors that can be applied.

  

You need to be really creative in order to choose from the variations window from the Photo Editor – it’s like a catalog of visual options that present you what could the image look like when you apply a certain effect. On the other hand, handling colors will not be a problem as you can choose from the presented versions, without needing to know how the Hue or Saturation effects have been applied. Of course, professional users who also wish to have a good software solution at a more affordable price and that can give them quick access to editing a simple photo - will be delighted to notice that the interface of the software is very similar to others from well known and professional image-editing tools.

  

Applicability: I would recommend this software to any digital photo amateurs and to those who wish to get a very efficient image processing tool at a good price. You probably will not see this Photo Editor in design studios, but more likely in the computers of the home users.

Pro(s): It is a very good challenge price-wise and feature-wise for those who cannot afford or think Photoshop is too complex.

Con(s): It is mostly designed for inexperienced users and sometimes the embedded tutorials can be boring – but I think the developers wrote them with lots of explanatory details in order to raise the interest of the public.
 
Official Website

Buy: $34.99

Download trial