As you might of guessed, we've all ready looked into patching Vista in memory, applying icons including live folders, and some of the other aspects of skinning Vista. All very doable.The hard part will be creating the actual .msstyles themes. In the past we've been able to rely on the hard work done by TGT Soft who created a skin builder for XP. Things have changed. So we had an idea...

The hardest part of theming Vista is the hex. Themers like UKIntel and others have done a great job mapping out certain elements and if you look at the themes being put out here at DA, themers are all doing different things. So here's what we propose to all you Vista themers:

We're going to code and create a Vista msstyle Variant Property Editor. Basically it will display and allow a user to edit certain properties that are encoded in the hex data of an msstyles' Variant/Normal resource. Rather than requiring a user to painstakingly find the associated address and modify the contents, this utility will parse out 'known' properties from the resource and permit them to be edited and saved. Known properties will be defined in a human readable xml file which will permit users to add their own definitions and extend the features of the product. We think this will take on a life of its own and become a valuable resource.

We see this utility not being open source, but it would be a freely available utility. Each property definition could have an associated 'credit' value, that would display the name or alias of the person responsible for adding it, thus encouraging users to add their own property definitions and make them available for everyone.

The utility would take about 4 weeks to code (we're footing the bill) and then we would release it to the community. If i get enough positive response from theme artists we'll sanction it to be built by our coders. We'll input all the known properties that have been documented on the web. I think together, we can make theming Vista a little easier. Tell me what you think.

Update: We're going to do it. There's a thread on WinMatrix that's pinned on the subject. You can see it here: [link]

This is where the utility will end up living. I've given Graeme our coder the green light to start building this once we've launch. There's 2 coders working on Hyperdesk so it may start sooner. We've partnered with an incredible coding company called Arizona Bay and we've been working with Graeme ever since. He'll be on their answering questions from time to time.

Update #2: Someone over at WinMatrix asked a question you might find interesting. Our coder, Graeme, addressed it.

Question: "the trouble is if you hex the start menu margins, it makes it nearly impossible to find other values to edit can you compensate for that?"

Answer: here's what I understand what he's suggesting: say the hex file is a huge book with 10's of thousands of pages with no page numbers so that any time you want to find a particular page you need to count off each page from the start 'till you get to it. each page represents a theme property that we want to change, tho some properties are multiple pages and some are variable numbers of pages, it's the properties that are variable numbers of pages (variable size) that can throw off the counts, since if I change a property and change its size, then I change the location of all the properties that follow it. For example: page 10 contains a variable size definition of a margin - originally it is 2 pages long. page 20 contains a size definition of a font, only one page long. When I change the value of the margin and its size change to 3 pages long, then the font is now located on page 21. Make sense? In other words, we can compensate for it, as long as we know the changes that have been made already. Which we will.