In the very first public display of collaboration of it's kind (at least I think it's first, correct me if I'm wrong)… Microsoft & Mozilla Foundation have a common agreement over the RSS icon. People using Mozilla family of browsers will be delighted to know that it's still orange! In a post made on IEBlog by IE Team members it was made public "that it’s in the user’s best interest to have one common icon to represent RSS and RSS-related features in a browser.  And the winner is…"

It is really exciting to see collaboration between competitors in the best interest of their customers I hope to see many more examples of cooperation between the 2 organizations.

Yesterday Dec. 13th, 2005, a young graphic artist & Windows™ Visual Styles maker known in the community as KoL and owner of studiotwentyeight.com; removed one of the most popular Visual Style known as VistaXP from his site as well as other sites where it was available like Neowin.net, deviantart.com. The decision was prompted by a request by Microsoft asking him to cease work on this skin and take necessary actions to prevent continued redistribution of his work.

For people who aren't aware of Visual Styles... a Visual Style is basically a skin for Windows (Windows xp and Windows 2003 in particular). And it comes in 2 varieties, .msstyle format the default skin format for Windows. Though Microsoft didn't allow using 3rd party visual styles using UXTHEME (the Windows xp Skinning Engine), there are ways you can do it ;-). The other variety is Window Blinds skin .wba which Star Dock software has been referring to as Visual Style since version 4.5+.  My last post does talk about Window Blinds 5. It incidently contains an image of VistaXP.

I have mixed reactions to this incident. Although some people have reacted very strongly against Microsoft's decision from blog entries like mine to ridiculous forum postings, there is a large number of people who understand the need to protect such graphic work from being ripped. Look at it this way KoL wouldn't be happy if someone ripped off his work and changed a thing or 2 and then try to pass it as his own work. That's pretty much the same case with Microsoft, I guess! There is one more thing that came to my mind, it seems Microsoft is very close to feature lock down of Vista, and it is possible that the default skin may already been locked to the one as it exists in build 5259 with the pearl drop like Start Button (though I'm not a great fan of it personally speaking). The last 2 versions of VistaXP a.k.a VistaXP 3.0 & VistaXP 3.1 (Window Blinds 5 only) did include a version with this type of Start button.
So I think it's very much possible that Microsoft didn't want a large user base to get so much used to KoL's Visual Style that when Vista finally rolls out... they don't find much difference in the UI compared to Windows xp.

But does this mean that people would stop using or asking for a visual style that has reached enormous popularity, and this controversy will only heighten it's already huge fan base. It's been years since Apple's cease and desist notice to the creator of Y'z Dock. Yet it is the most popular among all dock applications on Windows. Take me for example VistaXP was probably the reason why I purchased my copy of Window Blinds 5. That's food for thought!

I finally purchased Window Blinds 5 yesterday. At $19.95 it is one incredible app, and I have to say that I like what I've seen so far. The most awesome feature will obviously be per pixel αlpha blending. Here's a screenshot of my desktop with VistaXP v3 Visual Style by KoL, of StudioTwentyEight.

Though I have to say that the most impressive thing about WB5 that amazed me is that it doesn't need to any dedicated process in order to run, it runs as a native Windows XP extension there's no exe that loads at startup nor there's a background service. I used Process Explorer by Mark Russinovich but there's not even a handle that I could find to wbload.exe or wblind.dll or tray.dll. Now that's neat!