How Did They...

Anybody here know of the program WindowBlinds(www.windowblinds.net)???

Well, I was wondering how they did that. Does anybody know???

Maybe they got the HWND of the windows and changed the color or other attributes.

I don't know exactly what WindowBlinds does though.

Maybe they installed a hook that intercepted paint messages and drew them in a different way.

Well, if you look at the earlier versions, you can see that sometimes it makes a mistake when drawing the close/min/max buttons. This leads me to believe that they are just intercepting the creation / sizing messages and then just drawing bitmaps _over_ the ones drawn by Windows

Hi,
Manipulating the Non-Client (Caption, border, caption buttons) is fairly straight forward.
I have done it myself.
However I have not intercepted or hook another
program and changed their look and feel.

In MFC you can derive a class from just about any CWnd derived class
and override the NCACTIVATE, MOUSEACTIVATE, NCPAINT, NCHITTEST messages etc.. and basically do
what you like.

The menubar area. however is a bit of a problem.

they installed systemwide hook by using SetWindowHook function. Use QuikView to see other windows functions they are using