The bar has taken on a new and improved look. Panes can now be minimized to just their caption, and they can be scrolled if you have too many to fit on your screen. They can be dragged and dropped into position, and expanded panes can be pinned out. The Windows XP theme look has been vastly improved, and the bar will look correct with a much wider range of third party themes.

New MP3 Player
The MP3 Player has been rewritten from scratch and boasts a new look and a less restrictive interface, as well as an option to play your tracks in shuffle mode.

Taskbar Integration
This is in early stages, and the first release of BETA4 will only have an option to display a start button at the top of the bar. This aspect of the bar will be improved with future versions, however.

Translucency
Again, this is in early stages, but with BETA4 you can apply translucency to any or all of the SmartBar, expanded panes, taskbar or start menu.

Resizable Bar
The bar's width can now be resized.

Pane Enhancements
Numerous other pane enhancements include multiple accounts for the POP3 mail pane, 5 day weather forecast, and more control over MSN Messenger. BETA4 will still not work with MSN5 under windows XP, however.

Skinning
The way skins work for BETA4 has been changed from BETA3, which is why I didn't create any more skins after the Longhorn one, or release any information on how skins worked. After the release of BETA4 I will create a small program that will take a number of bitmaps and put them together with some other information, to create a skin file. More information on this will be available on this site following the release of BETA4.

More info:
hxxp://www.smartbarxp.com/smartbarxpb4.zip