ManagedShell

Despite trying their best to maintain a balanced mixture of innovation, coherence and similarity to former iterations when crafting their interfaces, developers sometimes still end up implementing their own vision of what the design should look like, with certain influences from industry trends or samples of consumer preferences powered by telemetry. As a result, a significant portion of the user base can feel alienated by drastic changes in the philosophy behind the layout and style of the program’s visual elements, especially when it comes to lackluster customization options.

The same can be applied to operating systems, whose core functions are an integral part of most users’ workflows, which is why community-powered projects such as ManagedShell come to fruition, attempting to provide tech enthusiasts with the necessary tool sets required to mold Windows’ desktop interface according to their needs.

This open-source library written in C# allows developers to create different designs of the OS’s taskbar to the system tray area to either mimic their Linux or OSX counterparts with menu bars, docks and floating widgets that go beyond Windows’ original intentions and let users transitioning from the aforementioned systems have an easier time doing so.

Apart from potentially allowing you to optimize the UI in a way that would recreate the Windows Mobile layout for small tablet PCs, one example known as Retrobar managed to make use of the library in order to bring back the taskbar styles of older Windows versions ranging from its 95 version to the Vista iteration to satisfy the community’s nostalgic hunger for re-experiencing abandoned design languages.