The last few years have seen a rise in “skinability” of applications and even operating systems as a whole. Stardock has taken a look back and reviewed the year in skinning. “2002 was a turning point for skinning. It was the year where millions of people started using skins without even knowing what the heck skinning is.” writes author Brad Wardell. Read the rest at stardock.com.
2002: The Year In Skinning
About The Author
Adam Scheinberg
Technology Executive • Web Developer • Father • Foodie • Music Snob • OS enthusiast
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many OSS fans seem to spend a lot of time skinning KDE and GNOME, and they weren’t included. Not trolling, just an observation.
I am not surprised considering that Stardock doesn’t have products for Linux…so they only focused on Win skinning.
i so wished it wasn’t because now we got all these different programs looking different and theres no unification. just annoys me
Right now, the bulk of the skinning community is Windows Centric. Today they are supporting 3-4 sites that are pushing more traffic than a community site can reasonable afford the bandwidth for. The number of new skins per week in the Windows world is vastly higher than the X (Gnome, KDE, Sawfish, E, …) world. Largely because it centers are fewer competing formats, and a larger base of artistic users.
The other issue at hand is number of users. I would say that more Linux machines are used as servers, and that the most talented artists of today are generally working on Mac’s or Windows machines. The Gimp is good, but it’s still not a Windows or Mac box with Lightwave, Maya, 3DS, Photoshop installed.
The other gotcha is something that you’ll only find out if you spend a good amount of time around the Windows skinning community. It’s older than you would think. It’s not all 14-18 year old kids. And I think that more telling than anything else. People that have been using Windows for 10 years now, and have strong art backgrounds, using Windows, are going to skin what they know, and aren’t going to change platforms.
For example, compare the quality and quantity of skins and themes published on themes.org and it’s sites to those found at http://www.deviantart.com or wincustomize.com or deskmod.com . I think that you will find the volumes fairly high.
As a disclaimer, I’ve worked with Brad for about 6 years now. He’s a reforming OS/2 user, who seriously considered doing Linux software, but chose to focus his small company and it’s efforts on where he could make enough money to feed his family and those of his employees. Something that was a serious problem when the OS/2 market collapsed from under his feet. Going to Windows was a very tough emotional decision for a guy that was passionate about OS/2.
a few question?
Will a skin modify all gui element including those of third party software ( e.g. Photoshop, Word )?
Will the skin affect system performance?
thanks and best wishes to all for the New Year!
Of course skins will affect the performance of your system..
And there may be many ‘professional’ skins available for Windows/whatever, but most of them just suck.
I rather have a few good looking skins than lots of bad looking skins.
Does anyone know if there is a Windows -> GTK or Windows -> KDE skin converter? Some of these skins look great, it shouldn’t be that difficult to convert them to {insert Linux GUI interface here} skins.
Yes skins effect the performance of the system, though on XP, you are already paying that price for it’s new look, over ‘Classic’. It’s fairly minimal. As to the technologies, what is skinned depends upon the methodology. StyleXP, only the elements managed by the new Windows XP looks are changed. WindowBlinds is more pervasive and flexible. With WindowBlinds almost all elements of the UI are Skinned, especially when paired with WinStyles, which also themes and skins applications that do thier own skinning and icons, along with Windows XP logon screens, bringing with it a consistancy to the UI despite not being the stock off the shelf look from the Vendor.
And yes, I agree, I’d rather have a few good skins, over a bunch that are terrible, but what you’ll find is that within the community, what defines a good skin differs dramatically. So the top 15 skins for any given user is rarely consistent. This is a huge part of the allure of skinning in general. Your mileage may vary, but I find that my own tastes run to the more subtle, and yet I use an OS X box by choice. My Windows boxes almost all use skins by Essorant, as his tastes are the most closely aligned to mine. Tight crisp visually unintrusive themes. But that is just my tastes, and are not the top 15 of most of the community.
remember fushia spantex and velvet bandana, that was the worst of the 80’s. Skin are just like that. They will stay a while but not forever. They are just an anchor that tie us to the desktop metaphore. Once more AI come into the scene less skin will be produced. I have nothing against skin as a display thing, i only hate them when they come haunt functionality consistency and performance, in other work skin should never touch active component and only be use on passive part of the OS or app.
Using Windows 2000 here with WindowBlinds and the BeOS Dano skin and ObjectBar with the BePC theme emulating the BeOS Deskbar and BeOS icons and a BeOS-ish wallpaper. It’s not BeOS but it feels close to my heart when I’m using it
Bernd! I want Zeta! Now!
Oh yeah, there’s a bad side to skinning as well. Using an Athlon XP 1600 (1.4ghz) with 256 megs of SDRAM and the CPU utilization is 100% when moving around WindowBlinds-skinned windows. Normally, it stays under 10% though.
The two main problems I have with skins are:
1) Inconsistent interface
2) Most themes (and themeing engines) seem to be geared towards English only users
If there were a standard for themeing, I think it might be alright. Such as Windowblinds. But then you have programs like Trillian that have to do things their own way. So you have to find a matching skin or make your own. People such as myself don’t have time to make our own skin. Maybe if all skinable programs came with a skinless option. And not just some skin that looks like the default Windows look.
One of the new things of 2002 was the emergence of WinStyles. It lets you create suites. So you could put your WindowBlinds, Trillian, Winamp, wallpaper, and icons together into a single suite and then WinStyles will apply them all at once so that you can have a more consistent interface.
As for performance, on modern hardware, speed isn’t the concern. It’s compatibility. Even XP’s own visual style engine has issues with certain obscure apps. So clearly there’s a YMMV issue.
one thing that causes problems with skinning on windows is microsoft’s further attempts to squeeze money out of people by requiring them to pay for extra skins, or for window blinds, another issue is the preformance hit on a windows machine from a heavily skinned window border with a system such as window blinds.
X window is a far better system for skinning, mainly because most of the toolkits are built to be extensible, open, and themeable.
as for the GIMP not being up to skinning work, i personally think it’s plenty powerfull enough, it’s been used by a lot of linux artists to produce good themes, themes.freshmeat.net is a good example of that.
i’m not the best skinner in the world, but i quite like my most recent attempt.
http://sealsystem.sourceforge.net/bgp/xfce.png
the performance is terrible and the skins are more or less patchworks with ugly pieces of the original skin showing up somewhere. tribute where tribute needs to be, but for a commercial app, windowblinds just sucks big azz.
Actually, the skining StarDock (and me) support is one that skins every application, not one application.
hell, you are all just jealous that the winbox have lot’s of skins to choose from compared to linux or other alternative OS for that matter. flame me..now!
hmmm, no, not worth flamming, i’m sure you’ll get modded down, you’re simply jealous that we use real operating systems and not the latest plastic blue looking thing that M$ fed us.
Linux is a bunch of unstable, uncomplete, uncompatible, crashing, unreliable and buggy apps. It’s great on the server though, so use it there. Anything else is pushing it.
Win2k, the most “stable” of them all has crashed on me twice today. So yes, Microsoft makes even buggier operating systems than the Linux folks. But at least it aims these towards the end user, not the end geek.
I can put Win98 on a P150 with limited disk space in 3 hours tops including the install and fiddling. And it will work. And it will be fast. Takes even less to put BeOS on it. Maybe a nice DevEd 1.1. It takes at least a day to put Linux on it. Mainly because all the mainstream distros expect you to have at least a 10 gig hard drive. And that’s sick. I was installing Slackware 8.1 here today and noticed that glibc took 97 megs. I dropped my jaw on the desk with a freaking loud bang. It’s amazing how bloat Linux has become. And how slow. And it’s still unstable – Redhat 7.2 kernel used to freeze randomly on my Athlon, supposed to be an “official bug”.
rant: off, sanity: on.
Seriously though, Linux has limited uses unless you are a geek.
If you are an end-user, get a freaking Mac instead!
Ok, this was off-topic. Dont skin me for that. Heh. Get it? “Skin”… uh. Never mind.
Assuming you have a reasonable machine, skinning shouldn’t cause any noticeable hit.
I run several different programs on my ThinkPad T20 (600 Mhz) without any detectable difference in speed.
“you’re simply jealous that we use real operating systems and not the latest plastic blue looking thing that M$ fed us”
Don’t be so sure my geek friend… I have unix box too; so there’s no point in me getting jealous at you. Please get a life apart from computers.
My only point is, we should LEARN to give credit to whom it is due. Just because something good applies to an M$ product, it doesn’t mean we should put it down already.
I use it on my P266mhz, 2.5mb ram (neomagic 256) and well, I can afford it!
It’s up to you to make your choice… I dont need “superfast” computer since main use is mail/browsing/chat. What I need is a more flexible UI that I designed myself…
Check http://liberte.free.fr/LS to view a few sshot. Skinning is great. Just let a SINGLE app do it system wide for consistency, and it’s fine.
>>one thing that causes problems with skinning on windows is microsoft’s further attempts to squeeze money out of people by requiring them to pay for extra skins, or for window blinds<<
?? Window Blinds isn’t developed my microsoft. How is it their fault? You think MS should force stardock into being a not for profit company??
There is nothing wrong with changeing the appearance of apps. The biggest usability problems come from inconsistant apps. Should you right or left click or double click on the icon in the task bar? Apps that have their menus different to others etc. That is worse than skinning.
“Don’t be so sure my geek friend… I have unix box too; so there’s no point in me getting jealous at you. Please get a life apart from computers.”
hmmm, thanx, i have a life besides computers, please, dont get so uptight, i was talking about those people who decided that XP was a worthwhile upgrade purely on the basis of it having a new blue gui.
“My only point is, we should LEARN to give credit to whom it is due. Just because something good applies to an M$ product, it doesn’t mean we should put it down already.”
i do give credit where it’s due, Stardock have done a good job with their suite of make-over apps, but micro$oft have simply added simple bitmapped skining to the windows UI, it’s not a difficult job, they have the windows source code to hand remember, and they haven’t done a terribly good job of the skinning they have implemented, whats more, they give you only 1 theme with 3 sub themes, and if you’d like a change you either have to fork out money for the plus pack from M$ or ThemeXP or WindowBlinds3 from their respective developers.
that’s all, sorry you thought i meant you, unless that is the sole reason why you purchased XP…
“i was talking about those people who decided that XP was a worthwhile upgrade purely on the basis of it having a new blue gui”
“”YOU’RE”” simply jealous that we use real operating systems and not the latest plastic blue looking thing that M$ fed us.”
“that’s all, sorry you thought i meant you, unless that is the sole reason why you purchased XP…”
Well put; nxt time BE CLEAR with the things you say and to WHOM you’re saying it. MAKE IT EXPLICIT. The statements of yours above led me to believe you were solely addressing me. NOWHERE in the context of your statements was it obvious, that you were addressing the people in general.
getting O-T here
peace
i would have expected you to have noticed when you read “not the latest plastic blue looking thing that M$ fed us” that’s all, anyway, doesn’t matter now.