I've tried to convince myself the look wasn't important, a nicer appearance was only a distraction from what's really inside the heart. But lately, after seeing the buzz around competitors who look good to begin with, I had to surrender and admit that the first impression an application makes is by its look.
I don't think slimKEYS is ugly, far from it. You can even customize its colors very nicely. But it fell short of others capitalizing on transparency and captionless windows to deliver a slim (!) design.
Here comes the beta version of slimKEYS 1.0.6, with, amongst other things, a new look. Feel free to comment, please rant if necessary, the look can easily change beofre the official release. For the moment, this new look is all code-based. No bitmaps, no public skinning interface. But as before, you can change all colors.
With that new version, you can also customize the matching name of all three slimLAUNCH extensions. For FileSystem items, you can include part of the path, the drive letter or the extension in the matching string. For Passwords and Delicious items, you can specify any custom string pattern, with variables in the form of <category> or <tag> or <title>, with a bunch of predefined suggestions.
You can find the beta in the downloads section, with a list of changes.