When I upgraded to Win 8.1, I was disappointed (although not surprised) at the lack of enhancements to the Start Screen. At the least I was hoping for a way to resize it or make it transparent so that it wouldn't interrupt my workflow when I needed to launch a program. Alas, MS it seems is pushing its tablet interface on us whether we like it or not, and desktop users be damned...
So I spent a month fooling around with Spy++ and figuring out how to make the Start Screen do what I wanted. What I have isn't perfect, but I am able to adjust the size and transparency of the Start Screen, which was my goal. I'd say it's pre-alpha at this point, but functional.
I'm making this post to see if anyone is interested in contributing to the project, or even using it...I am definitely more motivated to polish it up if I know the project is scratching other people's itches and not just my own.
Thanks! And of course any feedback is appreciated!
PS. I know there are many other products that do this same thing, but the ones I tried either didn't work, were full of installer add-on garbage, or didn't have the resize capability that I wanted. Plus, coding this up was pretty fun :)
https://github.com/pprov/menumod
When I upgraded to Win 8.1, I was disappointed (although not surprised) at the lack of enhancements to the Start Screen. At the least I was hoping for a way to resize it or make it transparent so that it wouldn't interrupt my workflow when I needed to launch a program. Alas, MS it seems is pushing its tablet interface on us whether we like it or not, and desktop users be damned...
So I spent a month fooling around with Spy++ and figuring out how to make the Start Screen do what I wanted. What I have isn't perfect, but I am able to adjust the size and transparency of the Start Screen, which was my goal. I'd say it's pre-alpha at this point, but functional.
I'm making this post to see if anyone is interested in contributing to the project, or even using it...I am definitely more motivated to polish it up if I know the project is scratching other people's itches and not just my own.
Thanks! And of course any feedback is appreciated!
PS. I know there are many other products that do this same thing, but the ones I tried either didn't work, were full of installer add-on garbage, or didn't have the resize capability that I wanted. Plus, coding this up was pretty fun :)