Sunday, May 26, 2013

window 8 Transprant Start....


I came across an interesting tool the other day. It's called Windows 8 transprant the start, appropriately enough, and it's by deviantart user vhanla. Simply put, this tool makes it super easy to customize the background and appearance of your Windows 8 start screen. 

Above is a quick video I made of how it works and what sort of effects it gives. It actually works surprisingly well, with no distortion or the like on the background image, and it creates a nice out-of-focus effect for the background. A neat idea, in my opinion, would be to screenshot the desktop and apply a gaussian blur prior to displaying the start screen (or perhaps do this periodically in the background), as this would give a neat window-blur affect to the start screen. Or maybe I just miss Aero too much. Anyhow, watch the video above for a quick look at vhanla's work, and hit up the link above to try it yourself.

Windows 8 Start Screen Customizer v1.3.8 beta

This is a new version of this tool that will change your Windows 8 Start Screen background picture.

This tool doesn't need to edit your imageres.dll file anymore.

Changelog:
• Fixed bug on enabling/disabling another monitor.
• Added support for High DPI settings.

New:

• You can set your desktop wallpaper as background picture (not support for multimonitor, it just uses the main monitor's desktop wallpaper)
• You can select your pictures from any folder and set it as a sequence of background pictures.
• There is a blur effect available, it is slow and slower on bigger resolutions, but it might work for you.
• Tiles opacity can now be changed (not perfect though)
• You can revert to default background

Old and still available features:

• You can choose a picture and select the area to be shown as background picture.
• You can set the StartScreen transparency
• You can set the rows of you tiles (limited by your screen resolution)
• You can run it on startup hidden, so you can see your custom background as soon as this tool starts
• Save configuration to ini file.

On screen resolution change, StartScreen remains with the previous background picture using the screen resolution (if application is not running), but the tool will fix it as soon as it detects resolution change.

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