Window blinds creating exe files

from WinCustomize Forums
As a small one man company i'm always on the lookout for new income perspectives.
i thought a lot about how i would be able to sell skins to company's and i came to
the conclusion that this is hard to do, every pc in the company needs wb to run.
but what if Window blinds can make executables? what if i can make any program execute
with the desired skin on it's own without WB to run it? Now i could write to company's and tell them
hey wouldn't it be nice if the program (acountants program?) has the look and feel of your company?
the skin should not be changeble and should aply to one program only. i could make cheap templates
you sell to small company's and i could make special onetime only designs for the richer company's.
I could make money!

Cheers Eddie
3,600 views 3 replies
Reply #1 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Stardock already sells the component of WB that handles the skinning that companies can buy and build into their applications to add skinning. So, if you want to do something like this you'd have to actually write the application that the company is using. The only other way would be to write an application that in the end would act exactly like WB other than you would only support 1 skin and you probably wouldn't have the tie into the appearances tab in the OS but other than a few minor changes it'd be exactly what WB is today. I'm not sure there are many companies that are interested in spending money just to make their accountants software application look different. It makes sense for some companies to spend money to integrate skinning into their applications but I don't see why a company would pay money to add that capability to existing applications.

Just my .02
Reply #2 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Stardock does indeed make such software. It's called DirectSkin, and it uses the same skin format as WindowBlinds. In a nut shell, the software developer includes the DirectSkin OCX in their application, which makes it skinnable. The developer can choose whether they want to allow the user to select skins, or if they just want to use a single skin. As far as I know, it does not require the developer to re-write the software. They simply need to recompile it with the DirectSkin OCX. You can learn more about it here: http://www.directskin.com
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