Lee Chantrey

Lee Matthew Chantrey (born in August 27th, 1987) is a specialist software engineer widely known as the programmer responsible for porting the Windows Vista start menu to Windows XP and is also the programmer responsible for the popular "Vi" range of projects that are featured today in the Vista Transformation Pack. Although he is now known for Vista emulation software he had developed several other projects which are now discontinued.

His first noticable program was the Longhorn SideBar emulater for the Longhorn Transformation Pack first published on TCMagazine which is now discontinued. After that he went on to develop LSN Messenger (MSN Messenger Clone) and L-Engine (A RPG Game Engine) and are currently not made available from his official website.

His current official website, Lee-Soft.com was registered in May 2007
This contradicts with the information published on his own website and he was then finally recognized as the programmer of ViStart. His website launched with 2 projects(ViStart and LEngine) and was shutdown several times due to bandwith limitations
. It now only hosts his "Vi" software range.

ViStart

ViStart emulates Windows Vista's Start Menu in Windows XP. It also features a searchbar that enables instant search results (similar to Vista's, but in fact 4 times faster than the original one made by Microsoft) .

Programming for ViStart began in May 2007. The software went through 5 stages of public beta testing where each version added new major features. At Stage 5 of Beta testing Lee had launched his website. The early betas were released on Windows X's homepage before his own site was created.

Stage/Beta 3
The most significant version (titled "Search at last" on WindowsX) this version was Lee's first implimentation of instant program searching in ViStart.
Stage/Beta 6
This version included file indexing which enabled the user to search quickly through their documents from the program search bar in ViStart.

ViOrb

ViOrb is a Start Button replacement for Windows XP. It gives the look and feel of Windows Vista's start button, also enabling the top portion of the Start Orb for Windows XP, which is impossible to recreate without the use of a third party application.

ViSplore

ViSplore is a Windows Explorer replacement for Windows XP. It was made to emulate Windows Vista's Explorer window.

It is being made since a regular Explorer window will not allow any type of transparency past the Window border. Along with including all of the functionality of the original Vista Explorer, ViSplore will include some extra features, yet to be revealed.

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See Also

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