VistaStyleBuilder

OK, so I bought Win 7 Style Builder, and today I changed just a few items, the commandmodule background, the details pane and the menu background. When I click on Test within the program it updates the Windows GUI and shows the changes correctly. When I finished and saved the style, I duplicated the Aero folder inside the Resources\Themes folder, I deleted the duplicated aero.msstyles and replaced it with Dark Green 10-8.msstyles. I gave the duplicated folder at the Themes folder the same name. Then I edited the theme file in notepad to reflect the changes, changing these to the correct name and path:

[Theme]
; Windows 7 - IDS_THEME_DISPLAYNAME_AERO
DisplayName=Dark Green 10-8

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

[VisualStyles]
Path=%SystemRoot%\resources\Themes\Dark Green 10-8\Dark Green 10-8.msstyles

But when I open the control panel to choose my style, it is listed under "installed themes", but although it does something when I click on it, the changes to the style are not applied, the commandmodule, details pane and menu bar background are still that vomitive baby blue. I know that the uxtheme patcher is working because I also have the Lumens style and when I apply it, it applies perfectly fine, and that's a style that not only has color changes but several graphic changes as well. If I apply mine after having Lumens selected, it stays on Lumens. I have to select one of the native Win 7 themes to get back to the normal glass appearance.

I would think this product is flawed, but people have successfully created styles with it, so can anybody give me a hand and tell me what I might be doing wrong? I'm running Win 7 RC 64 bit, which I asked Andreas before I bought the software and he said it was compatible. Maybe is there a specific extra thing I have to do because of being 64 bit?

Thanks,

Sebastian

The theme applier in 7 (Control Panel, not 7SB) is flawed and doesn't always work. It has nothing to do with 7SB.

Then why the Lumens style gets applied without a hitch each and every time? I can go between Lumens and the Windows 7 style back and forth at any time without a problem, but my style doesn't ever apply. I may be doing something wrong, but basically I just opened W7SB, chosed to start a new style, which it reads from the original aero, and modified a few things.

OK, I finally made it work, but there is a problem with Win 7 Style Builder. It occurred to me that one reason why the system might not be reading the msstyles file correctly was those weird numbers that W7SB assigns to the image resources, all above 10000 instead of starting at 508 as the original aero.msstyles does. Then I remembered reading something about this in these forums about an option to not change the image IDs and I searched for it again, figuring that at best I could try to match the real image IDs to the raw list in Restorator and change what I wanted. But after I opened W7SB with the -noupdateimageids option I thought I could make a couple of changes and see if it would work, and this time the style applied correctly, so I kept making all the wanted changes and updating it.

But clearly the software has a big bug if in its default state the saved style doesn't get applied but it does when you open it with a specific option, which according to that thread where it's discussed it doesn't allow Stylehacks to be applied to it. Still, it's much more useful than just opening the file in a Resource program and trying to figure out which image corresponds to what, but still is far from being user friendly. I mean, at least the author should have a place on his website showing all the different elements of the GUI, one screenshot for a Windows Explorer window, another for the start menu, etc, with arrows pointing to the different areas and what's the path in his software to replace them. Many paths in W7SB are still very cryptic, maybe GUI programmers might know those names better, but I don't and I don't have to. Another problem is that I see the same paths repeated more than once in the tree but some of the instances don't have any properties or images in them, so why are they there? My guess is that some belong to the msstyles usage in Vista and some to Win 7, but if that's the case, then there should be two programs, one for each OS, not paths that are still there but are empty depending on which OS is used. That only adds noise to the process when a user is trying to find elements to change.

Finally, this software could use more key shortcuts. What I did yesterday would have taken me several less minutes if I wouldn't have had to reach for the mouse every ten seconds to click on the Edit button.

I agree, the product could use a bit more polishing.  1.5 will be better because of documentation support and all the Windows 7 bugs out.

To answer one of your concerns:

- The repeated entries are often for the Basic parts.  If there are no images there, then it either inherits the image from the Aero branch or vice-versa.  Not easily understandable, I know.