Hehe John,
In fact, I abused that screenie to show off two interrelated things at once.
First off, it displays
native Win 10 windows that have regained, system-wide, their beautiful Aero decorations that replace
natively, i.e. without any unauthorized patching or hacking of the Windows system DLLs, the ugly and unicolored and disproportionate and dull Metro hell characteristic of stock Windows 10 as well as of some other poor man's alternatives.
This can be done using this
non-intrusive software. Until Win 10 Anniversary Edition (version 1607, build 14393), it just used Win 8+'s undocumented registry keys to regain former Aero functionality but now it also installs a driver that supervises the DWM's behavior to force it to use Aero compositing where it otherwise wouldn't, keys or no keys.
Without additional efforts,
Aero Glass will enable transparent, optionally blurry compositing but the look of window decorations will remain awkwardly rectangular and sometimes out of sync with the system's color Accent settings. Search
their forum for simple additional SW to control the Aero settings more closely and bring them in sync with the system settings, including Accent. You can also find there additional system texture atlases (no .msstyles patching again!) to bring back rounded window corners and neater window buttons, like you see in my screenie, and even Vista-style aero glass reflection on your primary monitor.
Aero Glass is free but it's donationware. For a symbolic donation of 3 euros or more you'll get a key (or more) to remove the nag message box and the watermark string at the bottom right corner of your desktop. Alternatively you can use any Win32 SDK-aware BASIC or even AutoIt to create a relatively simple script that would wait till such a nag message box is about to pop up and would then kill it before it makes itself visible. It appears only once when the first Aero window is opened on your desktop, and your script may safely quit once the nag box is killed. In the meantime it can also walk the Aero Glass process memory to find and chomp its desktop watermark string at its very beginning. Guess which strategy I followed?
And lastly, the screenie also shows off FBSL's own skinning engine that optionally enables us to ensure consistent look and feel of FBSL software, both official and user designed, throughout the supported range of Windows OSes, which is practically under any of them, should we so wish.
