Tweak UI is a free application, released in 1996 by

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

for customizing the

Microsoft Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

operating system's

user interface In the industrial design field of human–computer interaction, a user interface (UI) is the space where interactions between humans and machines occur. The goal of this interaction is to allow effective operation and control of the machine fro ...

. Tweak UI modifies the

Windows Registry The Windows Registry is a hierarchical database that stores low-level settings for the Microsoft Windows operating system and for applications that opt to use the registry. The kernel, device drivers, services, Security Accounts Manager, a ...

in the same way as a user could edit it manually with a program such as RegEdit, but provides a simple

graphical user interface A graphical user interface, or GUI, is a form of user interface that allows user (computing), users to human–computer interaction, interact with electronic devices through Graphics, graphical icon (computing), icons and visual indicators such ...

that does not need knowledge of the registry structure, is quicker and easier to use, and not susceptible to registry damage due to user error. Tweak UI was formerly downloadable free of charge from Microsoft's website. It is one of Microsoft's many non-supported '' PowerToys''.

History

Tweak UI started as a control panel

applet In computing, an applet is any small application that performs one specific task that runs within the scope of a dedicated widget engine or a larger program, often as a plug-in. The term is frequently used to refer to a Java applet, a program ...

available for download on Microsoft's website, released shortly after the release of

Windows 95 Windows 95 is a consumer-oriented operating system developed by Microsoft and the first of its Windows 9x family of operating systems, released to manufacturing on July 14, 1995, and generally to retail on August 24, 1995. Windows 95 merged ...

. It was originally written by Raymond Chen and later included in Microsoft's PowerToys collection, a set of tools developed by Microsoft's Shell Development Team. An updated version of Tweak UI was included on the installation disc for

Windows 98 Windows 98 is a consumer-oriented operating system developed by Microsoft as part of its Windows 9x family of Microsoft Windows operating systems. It was the second operating system in the 9x line, as the successor to Windows 95. It was Software ...

. According to Chen, this was deemed a "disaster" because it resulted in additional work for Microsoft's product-support teams when diagnosing problems. With the release of

Windows XP Windows XP is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It was released to manufacturing on August 24, 2001, and later to retail on October 25, 2001. It is a direct successor to Windows 2000 for high-end and business users a ...

, the Tweak UI applet was retooled and re-released on Microsoft's website as a separate

executable In computer science, executable code, an executable file, or an executable program, sometimes simply referred to as an executable or binary, causes a computer "to perform indicated tasks according to encoded instruction (computer science), in ...

, TweakUI.exe. It was again updated to version 2.10 for Windows XP Service Pack 1 and

Windows Server 2003 Windows Server 2003, codenamed "Whistler Server", is the sixth major version of the Windows NT operating system produced by Microsoft and the first server version to be released under the Windows Server brand name. It is part of the Windows NT ...

. Chen also wrote an updated

Windows Vista Windows Vista is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was the direct successor to Windows XP, released five years earlier, which was then the longest time span between successive releases of Microsoft W ...

version of the utility, but it was not released as it violated the policy of not making available unsupported software. An unofficial 64-bit version of Tweak UI was created by NeoSmart Technologies for Windows XP Professional x64 Edition.

History

References

Further reading