Stardock has unveiled its first beta of WindowBlinds 5 and with it, glass effects for Windows XP users. Stardock claims that beta 1 of WindowBlinds 5 achieves performance on the same level as the current beta of Windows Vista in terms of delivering glass effects. WindowBlinds 5 also is able to do deliver glass effects on relatively low-end hardware (though it still requires a video card with at least 32MB of video memory).
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"It's important to remember that Windows Vista is based on the latest 3D hardware capabilities. The entire desktop -- the entire environment -- is a 3D surface," said Brad Wardell, President of Stardock and also a Neowin.net contributor. "We recommend that our customers migrate to Windows Vista once it becomes generally available. But in the meantime, they can enjoy some of the eye-candy of Windows Vista on Windows XP."
Seems his entire reason for advising people to move to Vista is the better eye candy. I guess that's not a surprise coming from Stardock, who pretty much does just eyecandy. Still, a pretty lame reason to get a new OS, with the cost and time required.
RE: upgrade for eyecandy!
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2005-07-06
Member since:
2005-07-06
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I find it ridiculous how all this eye candy stuff seems to have taken over thinking.
First, Mac OS X came out, and had quite a lot of eye candy, as well as a solid, well-working UNIX base. Geeks around the world loved it, because they could just take their UNIXy programs and run them, in an interface that was well integrated.
Now, instead of looking at the integration side of things, the Linux folks copied the eye candy, thinking that by some freight-cult effect the usability would become better.
A few years later, MS tries to copy the eye candy, without looking at the much deeper issues of consistency and ease-of-use.
I would be extremely happy with a OS, be it from MS, that had the interface of NT 4. The eye candy just gets in your way, and you'll turn it off after a day or two. OTOH, the consistency helps your working.
