![]() Widgets, Gadgets, Objects = cool technologies looking for a practical use. ![]() In 2007, Winamp 5.5 was released which helped make it feature competitive with other players. Unfortunately, it’s fate has been largely tied to its popularity as a media player which has seen a decline as iTunes slowly took over and Windows Media player finally got to be “good enough”. Winamp is a media player that became very popular in the late 90s and helped popularize the term “skinning” in the first place. You can’t seriously do one of these skinning lists without mentioning Winamp. This strategy has led to its continued popularity to this day. WinStep isn’t a replacement shell as much as it is a way to extend Explorer. Hoverdesk became popular for a time but ceased development in 2003. Its popularity has declined as Windows explorer improved and system memory has increased but it remains in active development to this date. The Windows shell was, for the time, bloated, slow, and feature poor. Back in 2000, Litestep had a significant following. No list would be complete without talking about Litestep, the shell that let users replace Explorer. Without uxtheme and msstyles, I think it’s safe to say that skinning would never have gotten as popular as it did. What can be said is that msstyle skinners helped enrich the skinning community with some great designs. Many flame wars ensued over whether it was a good idea to patch system files. It didn’t take long before uxtheme was cracked to allow for additional skins which paved the way for programs like Style XP and a cottage industry of third-party msstyles. Unexpectedly, having created an engine that could do skinning, Microsoft never went beyond the Luna skin and locked the file format. Where WindowBlinds used wblind.dll Microsoft went with uxtheme.dll. One presumes Microsoft has access to the Windows source but instead chose to implement skinning the same way Stardock did – by creating a DLL that hooks to every process and intercepts paint calls to draw a skin for a file. Unfortunately, the method WindowBlinds used was done because developer Stardock didn’t have access to the Windows source code. In 2000, Microsoft liked the idea of WindowBlinds so much that they decided to use its implementation as the basis for a new skinning system in Windows XP. The success of WindowBlinds sparked a cottage industry of skinning programs but none (so far) have rivaled WindowBlinds in terms of sheer popularity.Īs WindowBlinds reached the end of the decade, it had seen the release of 4 new operating systems – Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7 and it’s still going strong.Īs much as I’d like to pretend otherwise, GUI skinning can’t be discussed without talking about uxtheme patching. WindowBlinds demonstrated both the marvels of skinning and its occasional depravity by letting users completely change the look and feel of the Windows GUI. No discussion of skinning would be complete without WindowBlinds. Let’s take a look at some of the highs and lows of skinning for the past decade. In that time, we’ve seen skinning rise from being a power user niche to being mainstream and now returning to being a power user niche again. And you while you are at Devart, also check out 037's Luna - Blue.The decade is just about over. Marc Daniel's TrillianXP for Trillian is a great looking skin for this free Integrated Chat Program. If you have problems with the skin, you can download the copy over here. There's one on the skins page at the Homepage of Powerarchiver, made by Rene Mossinkoff. Powerarchiver, a shareware replacement for Winzip, supports skinnable toolbars. Check out David Kerley's (the creator's) homepage here, though it's hard to find the skin there. Check it out.įound an Oxygenator XP skin at our very own Digital Dreams pages. Yve Buysscher also sent me a TClock skin. Definitely worth a check out, and lots of downloads.Ĭcr and armen, two deviants, shall i say, have created good TClock skins. Thecat2000's deviant user page is full of XP stuff, including a TClock skin. Also available at his Deviantart user page. A skin that captures the true flavour of XP. (You can check out his homepage here, but it seems to be offline now.)Ī kewl new Winamp skin named WinAMP XP made by trankillity is a necessary download. ![]() WhistlerAmp, made by Paul Speller, has sort of a pre-Luna look. There's quite a few XP skins for Winamp, but not all of them upto it. ![]()
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