Glonim adds fancy effects to the Windows operating system.  It was initially just an experiment to see if I could write ‘window hooks’ from scratch, which interrupt the hidden messages passed around behind-the-scenes between the operating system itself and running applications.

Glonim was originally only designed for Windows XP and a single-core machine!

• If you use a multi-core machine (or a CPU with hyper-threading), you may need to turn the textured background features off to avoid glitches that can occur over extended use.
• If you use an operating system after XP (such as Vista or 7), the window animations can be heavily slowed down.  This is because Windows emulates the effects in software, due to the Aero desktop.
• Glonim will not run in any sandbox products; it has to be able to interact with other programs.

You run Glonim at your own risk!!

Glonim contains its own textured backgrounds that suit the themes of Windows well.  If you want the marble backgrounds shown in the screenshots, which are widely available on the internet, click here:

Glonim works on everything from Windows 95 to XP, and enables options depending on what it sees your PC is capable of.  It can:

• Interrupt other windows’ redraw processes and add nice background textures.
• Animate other windows opening and closing instead of them just appearing and disappearing.
• Make windows transparent upon moving (a couple of other programs have this feature, but often not done as effectively).
• Put pictures on MDI backgrounds (software that has multiple windows inside a container)
• Texture some file browser windows.
• Change the Start button caption to the free memory, the day of the week, or custom text.
• Change toolbar bitmaps in Windows Explorer/Internet Explorer.
• Make the desktop text backgrounds transparent.
• Make the Taskbar transparent (with a slider to specify the level).

You can customise these features and totally exclude applications from Glonim’s real-time patch if you find a program that argues with it.

The background texture shown in the screenshots is a free marble design, but Glonim comes with my own patterns that are more subtle and suit the various standard themes well.

Here is an example of Glonim changing the ‘Date and Time Properties’ window.  Here is the window, as people commonly know it:

The same window, but with Glonim texturing window backgrounds:

Here is the more aggressive style that also textures tab backgrounds:

Often programmers avoid ever getting involved with window hooks or other forms of process injection because they are very hard to write successfully — even one tiny flaw can cause every other program running on the system to crash!  Glonim was vigorously tested but is not guaranteed to run properly on modern machines!