DuroBlend GUI: The new widget engine on the block..

For a long time, DesktopX was the only full-fledged widget engine for Windows. Then along came the copycats: Konfabulator (eventually Yahoo Widgets), that ugly "dashboard thing" available to Mac users, Google Gadgets (a me-too product in response to Yahoo's purchase of Konfabulator, or the other way around... who knows), and finally, Microsoft Gadgets (an 'all your base actually do belong to us and if you don't like it you might as well go hug penguins' product). Thus it would seem that there exists today a myriad of powerful UI products, considering the big companies involved, but the truth is that all of these widget engines are extremely lacking because of one thing... they are just about as developer friendly as a doorknob. Serious software developers who try to re-do the GUI of their software using any of the above widget engines will find themselves locked into an archaic scripting engine with limited features and little to no ability to communicate with existing software solutions. In short, the technology which should have been redefining and revolutionizing user interfaces for years has been kept in the dark. But all this is about to change, because there is a new widget engine on the block, and it goes about things a bit differently then do our client-application-based friends above...

DuroBlend is a one-of-a-kind windows class library which provides software developers and user interface designers with a fast, intuitive, unique, aesthetically pleasing, and altogether seamless alternative to the bland Windows XP user interface. Not only does DuroBlend work on both XP and Vista, but it also allows developers to integrate some of the advanced user interface capabilities of Windows vista applications on the more popular and generally stable XP operating system. DuroBlend lets developers construct alpha-channel-aware, completely translucent user interfaces comprised mainly of PNG files. Because DuroBlend is a class library, it is really an unlocked widget engine - It has all the powerful features of the generic widget engines, like DesktopX and Yahoo Widgets (in fact, DuroBlend has several extra graphical features these engines are lacking), but instead of taking these features and locking them down under a draconian scripting library and enforcing the use of a client .exe file, DuroBlend lets .NET developers access all of its core functions from the IDE of their choice.

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