User:Malnilion

From BB4Win Wiki

I guess this is as good a place as any to give myself a short bio, or something.

I found out about BB4Win pretty much by mistake. I did a search on SourceForge and I can't remember exactly what I was looking for at the time, but it definitely was not BB4Win. However, I was bored that day, so I started reading the descriptions for the results that came up on SourceForge. Prior to this point in time, I had already started exploring the vast world of open source software and had gone through the obligatory Linux-is-teh-r0x0r stage. At this point in time, however, I did not have Linux installed on my computer (and still don't, unfortunately) mainly because I needed hard drive space and was not willing to sacrifice my Windows partition because I have entirely too much. So, with all this in mind, I had heard about Blackbox while I was using Linux, though I must confess that I ended up using KDE and never really gave Blackbox a try. So, as I was reading through the really odd search results that SourceForge had given me, "Blackbox for Windows" literally jumped off the page at me and I was like, "Oh, that could be interesting, let's check out the page." I was hooked immediately. So, for a long time I used BB4Win and I guess bbLean was really coming into its own at that point. I'm glad I started out with BB4Win, though, because I really have a better understanding for how things work under the hood. I can feel like an old user saying, "Back when I was starting out using BB4Win, we had to actually edit files ourselves!" lol. After using BB4Win for quite a long time and being pretty satisfied with everything, I switched to bbLean to see what all the hullaballoo was about because by this point more people were using bbLean than BB4Win from what I could see. The main reason I wanted to switch, though, was because the new version of BBInterface was being ornery on BB4Win but apparently worked correctly on bbLean. So I used bbLean for quite a long time...like 6 months most likely and said I couldn't possibly beat what I had there. I made a few styles and really settled into bbLean. But then there was this guy...thewayofzen. He made me jealous with every style release he put up on the community style site. I wanted to have the prettiness of font shadows, of new bullets, of menu separators, and just the menus in general. I wanted it badly. But there was a problem. He was using xoblite and xoblite would not let me load bbLeanBar, which I needed. I needed a one-bar configuration and that sent me running straight back for bbLean. I told Karl that once he made it possible, I might be back. So time progressed and I continued running bbLean without problem for a few more months. Then it happened, bbLean started crashing and nearly taking my whole computer out with it at a rate of about once a week. Such problems are the kind of thing that piss me off. I was pissed off. All of a sudden during the time period of about late november or early december of 2005, I decided to switch to xoblite. I couldn't take the crashing of bbLean any more and could never figure out what caused it. Upgrading to xoblite (hehe, I said upgrading on purpose) seemed to fix the issue. I heard rumors flying around that there might be a new version of xoblite coming out. I emailed Karl about it and he agreed to let me test a beta. I got my first beta of xoblite 4 hours before he released bb3 (w00t, lol, I guess better late than never). Karl is a great guy and he listens to what his users have to say. Now I see why thewayofzen swore by him so strongly in the #bb4win channel on irc.freenode.net and I must say that I apologize for not using xoblite sooner. I now have what I consider to be the ultimate configuration for me with xoblite. And that's basically all I have to say about my life in the world of BB4Win for right now.