If you run Windows Vista or Windows 7 with the Aero enabled, which most of you probably due considering that it is the default setting for brand new installations, you may have noticed that the configuration options of Aero are limited.
What you can do is to pick a color in the Windows Color and Appearance control panel, enable transparency, set the color intensity and under color mixer, change values for hue, saturation and brightness.
Turning off transparency for instance can be very handy if you take screenshots regularly of open windows and programs in the OS.
Still, there are more settings available that are not listed in the control panel applet. That’s were Aero Tuner, a tool to demonstrate how DWM, the Desktop Window Manager, can be controlled with a software.
The developer has posted an extensive (Russian) article on the tool and the settings which you can find here.
The Aero Tuner application is linked at the bottom. Non-Russian reading users who are interested in the article may want to use Google Chrome, or an online translation service to translate the article into another language.
The portable app displays all settings in its interface on startup. It is possible to select the main and glow colors separately, which makes only sense if transparency is activated.
Four sliders are available under the Parameters section to control the color balance, after glow color balance, blur balance and aero stripes.
Changes are immediately visible in all open windows. A click on Save changes writes the new settings to the Windows Registry so that they become the new parameters for Windows Aero on the system.
You can download Aero Tuner from the developer’s website over at Winreview.ru.
Related Articles:
Aero Weather, Change Windows Aero Colors Based On Weather [US Only]Aero Adjuster, Automatically Change Aero Color Based On Wallpaper
WinShake Adds Aero Peek And Share To Windows Vista and XP
How To Disable Windows Aero Transparency In Windows 7
Windows 8 Aero Automatic Window Colorization
Enjoyed the article?: Then sign-up for our free newsletter or RSS feed to kick off your day with the latest technology news and tips, or share the article with your friends and contacts on Facebook, Twitter or Google+ using the icons below.
Cool, as MS not provided real black appearance (see above), I mad my style more blackish with this app. Thanks for sharing.
This doesn’t display or work correctly on my box with Vista Home Premium SP2 and .Net 4.0.31106. All the text is transparent and the color rectangles don’t show up at all. The changes also don’t take effect immediately, even after using “Save changes” – I had to logoff/on first.
But i didn’t claim it working on Vista.
Windows Vista has another dwmapi functions and i won’t support them since them deprecated
That’s why you can’t set colors on the fly in Vista
My apologies hb860. Martin’s above sentence that starts with “If you run Windows Vista or Windows 7…” led me to believe that the app was Vista compatible. That and the fact that I don’t read Cyrillic, and that your app doesn’t indicate that it’s not compatible with Vista.
Maybe a OS version check and a popup?
Windows Vista has a complete different DWM API. Vista only have settings for the Aero Color and it’s transparency. Only Windows 7 has this extended settings (internal), therefore this can’t work on Vista.
I have simular code in both of my applications, but I needed to add a seperate Code for both operating systems. But thanks for the article, before I thought I was the only one with applications that supports this :)