| I meant that skinning has already been cool before XP, with various degrees of attention to detail and various amounts of system hacks. WindowBlinds for the whole system, application-level reskins. Even Java applets were once considered cool simply because they used their own UI toolkit! Moreover, Microsoft had essentially sold wallpapers and cursors as Plus packs. However, after the release of XP developers did not stick to using correct native components that would automatically look like Windows 98 on Windows 98, and like Windows XP on Windows XP. They continued to reinvent everything via third-party skinning libraries, but now with kind-of-hip kind-of-XP styles. Random example: http://web.archive.org/web/20041213230620/http://www.helium2... Native menus don't work like that. The gradient between “Standard theme” and “Silver theme” background colors is someone's invention. Scrollbars should reach the top of the table views, and their native headers look different. Extra shadows here and there. etc., etc. Everything is improperly remade. I suppose it was an important topic if they specifically introduced visual style signing at the time when system files and drivers were not even required to be signed. Maybe the perspective of new antitrust trials botched another EEE campaign, maybe the peasants just refused to bow to the king that time. As for undocumented framework, look up "Windows DirectUser Engine" and "DirectUIHWND". Here's someone fighting with Raymond Chen in comments over IE pretending that having a copy of undocumented system library does not consist of using undocumented Windows APIs: http://web.archive.org/web/20080329044328/http://blogs.msdn.... The name “DirectUI” is spilled in other comments: http://bytepointer.com/resources/old_new_thing/20050211_035_... Side note: as bytepointer archive is badly indexed for this or that reason, I've wasted more than an hour trying to find the post I vaguely remembered seeing. A single mention of "duser.dll" on HackerNews has finally helped me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7811284 P.S. Nice contemporary controls re-implementing those Explorer panels from scratch (and copying the name): https://www.codeproject.com/articles/3216/directui-window-as... |
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