I believe Windows Visual Styles designers will love me for this. PS: No dirty wallpaper hacks or tricks are in use here, just pure transparency minus blur! Proof:
Cool. Now everything in the background looks exactly like the foreground. I think I'll keep the foreground in focus and the background out of focus. Kind of separates things for me.
The MSStyles theme I am using removes the background image from the taskbar. I just used it as a test for my program. You can use any style you want with it,including the default. There are some styles which just have a thin line for the taskbar which the icons sit on top of that would benefit greatly from this. I agree it is harder to focus with no blur, but as I said, there are some styles that could use no blur to their advantage.
I'm making a small utility to remove the blur. I'm going to release it when I iron out any last-minute bugs.
Awesome! Now all we need are visual styles that take advantage of it. This opens up a whole level of possibilities for myself and other Visual Styles designers.
I'm not very sure about this setting and don't know if it may work on your computer, but the following registry entries completely disable the blur effect on the windows frames with a simple transparency only (not applied on taskbar) at least on my computer after rebooting it (copy and save the following code with any name as .reg extension with Notepad then double-click the newly created file). Code: Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\DWM] "Blur"=dword:00000000 Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\DWM] "Glass"=dword:00000000 Or alternatively a tool named "Windows 7 Aero Blur Tweaker" (works on Windows 7 SP1 x86 and x64) developed by Door2Windows allows to disable/enable the blur behind the windows. In most cases it should apply the changes on the fly but may occasionally requires to log out for the settings to be applied.
I tried both, friend: No happenin's on Win7 Pro SP1 x64 so maybe one day. Edit: Update works a charm....
Long time no see guys! I've since made an updated version (0.2.0) that has a Run at startup option as well as a reduced .NET requirement (down to 2.0 from 4.0). You can keep track of updates here on my deviantART: hxxp://dblake1.deviantart.com/art/Taskbar-Blur-Toggle-0-2-0-412358153 or here's the direct download: hxxps://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/90860637/TaskbarBlurToggle_020.zip Also, since I see some of you were asking: this works fine on Windows 8 and 8.1 with BigMuscle's Aero Glass reimplementation. Otherwise, it does not work at all. Windows 8 and 8.1's DWM is crippled severely. There is nothing I can do to remove the color from the taskbar without the Aero reimplementation because the coloring is now hard-coded into explorer.exe. Disappointing yes, but it's what I have to work with.
that is color intensity not blur intensity, as in less/more blur nice example was Window Blinds 6 for XP, where user could set up should it blur more or less (stronger/weaker)
What? 1. My app does nothing but toggle the blur on the taskbar. Nothing more, nothing less. 2. No. This is not possible without changing it system-wide. 3. Use AeroTuner to change the intensity of the blur.