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mrrste — Silica XP
Published: 2009-01-12 19:44:01 +0000 UTC; Views: 30174; Favourites: 89; Downloads: 4516
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Description
New Year, New Skin
JackRebel.com, owned by *rebstile , was a major influence in this skin. I love the use of simple colours and the way they contrast everything nicely. So I decided I wanted that in a skin but to still utilize Aero, and Silica was born
Since the site features a lot of artists from all over, which can be a personal honour for anyones work being promoted, I wanted to keep that "personal" feel and thought what better way than to be able to brand it with your own identity. So I have made the FIRST skin where you can use your own initial as the startbutton
In this pack:
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Silica Windowblind skinned especially for XP
Styler Toolbar skin
24 Ready made Startbuttons (M is the defualt button of the skin)
Readme File
*IMPORTANT*
To change the startbutton to your choice, follow the readme file for instructions
Download and hope you enjoy!
Wallpaper in preview by =Venom339 [link]
Icons by ~maidanov [link]
Related content
Comments: 103
Man I have to say that is about the sweetest looking windows xp setup! great work!!!
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Super Mac'y, thanks
also Findexer's 'Big-Icons-Only' view is really super
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looks great, but yet again i was hoping that there'd be a style with a dark explorer background.
personally i think it's some sort of a pity that there are a lot of dark themes available which are dark to the very last detail (and i can tell you the details in here do look amazing) except for the explorer background, which then again doesn't make it a dark theme for me.
in resume i find your preview highly intriguing, but then found myself being hesitant to even give it a try.
sorry, Stephen ....but i prefer the dark themes.
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Really? explorer is 45,45,45. Any darker and it would jet black lol
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yes, really!
here the explorer background is at plain 255,255,255.
it would be great if it's only an issue with my WB that i can easily fix, because there might be some dark themes out there which i have falsly categorized as being not even dark at all.
but for now your SILICA is way too bright for me.
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oh u mean the white of the window? hehe
Windowsblinds freaks out when everything is dark like that because you need light text on dark and dark on light but they often mix and the colours can never be somwhere in between without being unreadable in parts.
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hmm, i don't know.
as i said i'm an addict of dark themes (currently using "No Name", substyle:Clear3 by *amaeli ).
yes, they're a minority and often hard to find, but still i'm using them and WindowBlinds never actually freaked out on them.
however, i know that there're some applications that aren't really friends with WB using dark themes (i.e. Photoshop), but then again i'm able to make an exclusion for the according app and tell WB to use another theme for that instead.
please don't get me wrong, i don't have the intention to tell you what's possible in WB and what's not.
i just want to say that for me it's a pity that your masterpieces do not provide an additional (dark) substyle and therefor give an opportunity for the user to decide on his/her own whether or not he/she would be willing to take the risk of having some unreadable parts.
i was so excited when you released that Concave port by `GeorgeHarrison the other day, but only to soon find out that the explorer backgrounds were white again.
you've been in the business of creating countless of amazingly brilliant WB themes for so long now and your knowledge regarding WB is likely to be one of a kind, but up to this day i'm still waiting to finally get my hands on a real dark theme that'd be created by the king of WB themes.
in terms of the dark explorer backgrounds... why can't you accomplish what *amaeli has accomplished in quite a few themes already?
please apologize my stupid question.
i didn't mean to offend you and i don't intend to be a pain in the ass.
i'm just a noob who's wondering.
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No offense taken at all
When I design a theme, I try to make different elements but that all work together. The result can be light buttons in one area but dark buttons in another, for example. Due to that, I have to get the balance of colours just right. If I have a light button, I need darker text on it and a dark button needs lighter text on it.
Sadly windows can show either the darker text or lighter text against a backround that it doesn't stand out on. If I was to fix that, it would mess up in another area. :amaeli: accomplishes this by using uniformed colours. He won't have light areas and dark areas in conjuction so can work with a pre defined pallette. I can imagine he takes the explorer into account when designing and works to fit it. I do the opposite.
Really dark explorer windows are less liked than light ones so I work to satisfy the majority too. I've actually designed skins with dark explorer windows but changed them at the last minute because I didn't think too many would like them
You and ~smoovie are the only 2 people that I have heard actually want a dark window so far hehe
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thanks very much for your detailed explanations.
however, i do think that a dark theme coming from your labs would be a massive success.
i think you'd be surprised how many people out there are actually and literally addicted to those dark themes.
just because most of the available themes are brighter ones doesn't necessarily mean that they're the most liked ones, in my opinion.
at my idea it's merely an indicator that until now only a few artists have been patient (or even brave) enough to try and conquer that beast called readability-of-fonts-in-all-elements, which is certainly quite tricky to take by surprise.
besides, if so few dark themes are currently available, ...doesn't that also imply that it seems most likely for a new darker released theme that it would deal with only a handful of competitors and therfor would face a striking victory?
moreover, isn't there a much greater chance for a dark theme to be used much longer and more often, if there is only a minor amount of comparable themes to choose from?
not to forget about another aspect of variety in your portfolio.
...and if you've designed those dark ones already, but changed them at the very last minute, ...why not keep them next time and maybe add a brighter substyle instead of completely exchanging it?
anyways...
...thanks for all your time and effort!
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taskbar is invisible here too, only see both ends.
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That is really odd because there is no way to disable the middle of a taskbar but only show the ends of it. It's all one image. Are you running anything else?
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*Very* modern/futuristic interface you got here! Excellence.
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Hey great work mate. I love the color choices, very original stuff. That styler toolbar is hot as well, love the glyphs. Cheers!
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wow..Very awesome skin!!my friend
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w0t! A breath of fresh air in the skins and themes channel!
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A lot of different text colors, not my thing. But the skin looks nice
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Well the colours are easily changed
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I do not use Windowblinds, but this skin looks so great, that it will make me to install that program.
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He-he. I switched to win 7 today. I have just 1GB RAM, so if I install windowblinds for Vista (??? I'm not sure about), my PC will explode.
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Wonderful job Mrrste. Can you please tell me where I can find the wall?
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Thank you
The link to the wall can be found in the description
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This looks great! I'll test it asap
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