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Winamp Skin Museum

skins.webamp.org

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Re: Winamp Skin Museum

#21

Post by DaanDL »

zthrowaway wrote: post #16

The thing about back then that was so amazing is the amount of personalization you had with your desktop environment. Windows 95/98 had different skins/themes you could use. Winamp and many other apps allowed skins. You used to be able to make your computing experience your own. We've lost that and really need to get it back. There's the ability to do this with Linux DE's of course, but that's not enough.

It was really wild, out of the box you would get: sound themes, color themes, icon themes, startup sounds, wallpaper themes, different loading animations, am I forgetting something? :-D

Re: Winamp Skin Museum

#22

Post by marginalia_nu »

Big thing that allowed this degree of personalization and skinning was that everyone was running fairly homogenous display equipment. When you don't need to deal with a whole spectrum of aspect ratios, input affordances, and DPIs, skinning and customization is something you can do in any image editing software.

Re: Winamp Skin Museum

#23

Post by atonse »

zthrowaway wrote: post #16

The thing about back then that was so amazing is the amount of personalization you had with your desktop environment. Windows 95/98 had different skins/themes you could use. Winamp and many other apps allowed skins. You used to be able to make your computing experience your own. We've lost that and really need to get it back. There's the ability to do this with Linux DE's of course, but that's not enough.

Omarchy seems to be doing a really good job with just that. But like you said, Linux.

Re: Winamp Skin Museum

#25

Post by DaanDL »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #22

Big thing that allowed this degree of personalization and skinning was that everyone was running fairly homogenous display equipment. When you don't need to deal with a whole spectrum of aspect ratios, input affordances, and DPIs, skinning and customization is something you can do in any image editing software.

Correct, and the same goes for webpages, they were built for 15" and/or 17".

Re: Winamp Skin Museum

#26

Post by cosmic_cheese »

zthrowaway wrote: post #16

The thing about back then that was so amazing is the amount of personalization you had with your desktop environment. Windows 95/98 had different skins/themes you could use. Winamp and many other apps allowed skins. You used to be able to make your computing experience your own. We've lost that and really need to get it back. There's the ability to do this with Linux DE's of course, but that's not enough.

On the Mac side of the fence, Kaleidoscope schemes were even more capable in terms of deep desktop theming, giving the artist full control of just about everything (window chrome, controls, icons, fonts, desktop pattern/picture). Even better, they didn’t require any installation step: double-clicking a scheme file was all that was needed to radically transform your desktop. Nothing matches its capability and ease of use even today.

Artists did some wild stuff with it. A few fun examples:

https://macthemes.garden/themes/c7005c70d044-Wrecked-Angles/

https://macthemes.garden/themes/2852d54a73a3-Windows-98/

https://macthemes.garden/themes/0219829f8a23-HolySmoke/

https://macthemes.garden/themes/8405ec7f05e4-MacPlaza/

https://macthemes.garden/themes/92b39d18db52-MammaMia/

https://macthemes.garden/themes/9a95c2efce50-Scanline/

https://macthemes.garden/themes/64bd1a86e9e6-Onyx/

Re: Winamp Skin Museum

#28

Post by zthrowaway »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #26
zthrowaway wrote: post #16

The thing about back then that was so amazing is the amount of personalization you had with your desktop environment. Windows 95/98 had different skins/themes you could use. Winamp and many other apps allowed skins. You used to be able to make your computing experience your own. We've lost that and really need to get it back. There's the ability to do this with Linux DE's of course, but that's not enough.

On the Mac side of the fence, Kaleidoscope schemes were even more capable in terms of deep desktop theming, giving the artist full control of just about everything (window chrome, controls, icons, fonts, desktop pattern/picture). Even better, they didn’t require any installation step: double-clicking a scheme file was all that was needed to radically transform your desktop. Nothing matches its capability and ease of…

Wow that's cool! I had no idea about these back then.
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