What we want back is the alpha blended transparency (the transparency with the special type of blurring). It's true that winaeroglass like in the previous post is technically transparent, but it is not transparency! What it is is nothing more than not having a fill set for the title bar. The taskbar in Windows 8 is transparent, but it isn't as transparent as Windows 7 and it certainly isn't alpha blended. Now for the bad news... apparently Microsoft are going to make the desktop even more 'flat' with 'Windows Blue' (basically Windows 8 SP1 but more under the guise of Windows 98 SE vs Windows 98). Seems bland is the new 'in' thing as far as Microsoft is concerned. Office 2013 and the Windows 8, what a very visually uninteresting combination! The sea of white and off-white in Office 2013 can only lead to reduced productivity since the colour (lack thereof) choice would actually increase mental fatigue and eye strain.
I have discovered, that nice blur can be provided by custom theme itself under these circumstances (explanation: Custom theme will not provide blur directly, but it can provide "another graphic effect mixing two different elements" what will be interpreted as nice blur by W8 with "Total Transparency". Early results (the final results can be a lot of better, in fact both Vista stripes and W7 blur can be made, when graphical person creating the theme pattern will be skilled enough): ... Now I am in contact with HB and another theme guy with intension to make this (TT enabler, main resident layers engine to remove atefacts, special themes, UI) as paid application. For this reason I will not talk about it here, until it is complete. BTW: I don't care, if it is BetaBlended or GamaBlended as long it looks nice, what isn't too hard compared, how fugly W8 looks by default... Basically if you will have HiRes PNG, where you can control percentage of transparency at each pixel (anyhow), you will get same (or better) effect... Also there could be another option: "adjusting global transparency level by selecting custom theme" ********* BTW2: Could anybody tell me, why MDL no longer displays pic previews in comments? BTW3: HB's daughter on that photo is so cute BTW4: Only needed component is UxStyleCore, so there is no DLL patch, so it will work OK with Windows Update...