Yeah, it was canceled. Publicly.

I have had to rename it, rearrange it, remake it from scratch even. But it survives. And I've been playing with it over the years, tweaking this, changing that. After nearly 5 years, it's almost usable.

Why now? Because I have a passion for design, and an unending curiosity of how WELL I can make it work. Like some mad scientist, endlessly tinkering with some grand experiment.

Notwithstanding numerous life changes, kids growing up and moving away from home, I couldn't let this one go. Whenever I had the inclination, I would plod away on aShell, trying some new ideas or improving on what I'd already done, because I'm convinced that it CAN be done.

Those who've seen it have urged me to continue working on it. And I hold their opinions in very high regard.

So, what's the new one like? FAST. It's still a suite of things designed to work together in a meaningful way -- but nowadays, that's par for the course. In an age when Dual-core and 4gb are commonplace, you'd think that bloat prevails. Not here. This thing is lean and mean on my modest hardware, with painstaking attention to detail.

Will it work on Vista and Win 7? Probably, with caveats. I designed it for XP, specifically. That's another obsession I have -- I think Windows XP is THE greatest OS ever made, and I want to push it as far as it'll go. Who needs Aero when you have Shadow?

The components have changed. BB4Win_Mod replaces Litestep, because it's the tool that fits the need. Performance gain through the ROOF on top of it.

True Transparency has taken over where WindowBlinds couldn't. I tried, REALLY tried, to get WindowBlinds to do the job -- but it's a PAIN to get it to do anything straightforward. TT is also WAAAAAAY faster. More performance gains.

There's no need for URL-Run anymore. Or AutoIt. Or AutoHotkey. Those have been removed entirely.

So it's fast AND occupies minimal space on your drive, while using as little memory as possible. That was a design goal from the beginning.

I'll post updates on my progress as needed. It's looking very, very good so far; and there might actually be a release worthy of public consumption finally.

Cheers!