Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Winamp Skin Museum

skins.webamp.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 69 posts

Re: Winamp Skin Museum

#51

Post by panzi »

cyril_st_john wrote: post #20
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.

One of the great things about Winamp 2 skins in particular is how simple the format is - basically just a bunch of BMPs in a zip file. Pretty much anyone could make one. You didn't need any special software or code knowledge to inspect an existing skin and see how the pieces fit together. You could make one in MSPaint if that's all you had, as I did for my first couple skins. (There were also a few INI-style config f…

Yeah, back in the day I made myself one from screenshots of the in-game GUI of Chrono Trigger. It wasn't very good, but hey, it was mine!

Re: Winamp Skin Museum

#52

Post by cosmic_cheese »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #40
cosmic_cheese wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could still be relatively simple if the industry could agree on a few standard DPIs for screens. While still a substantial amount of extra work, raster images with clean 1x, 2x, and maybe 3x variants are a lot more flexible and easier to produce something good looking with than trying to fight vector formats that will end up looking “fuzzy” 70% of the time due to lines landing on half-pixels and such.

Can't really put the toothpaste back in the tube on that one. Too many monitors that are like 30-40% off any clean integer scaling in the wild for that to be viable now.

Probably true, but I think if I were writing a theming system I’d still key it off of clean multiples and have fractional screens as second tier targets. Fractional screens are going to look somewhat compromised no matter what, so may as well let themes be their best if the user happens to have an integer scaling screen.

Re: Winamp Skin Museum

#55

Post by zen928 »

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.

I think its commonly cited how we "used to have so much customization" and now we dont, and i see that more as an issue with motivation over missing proper functionality. Android phones and iphones to an extent are extremely customizable in almost every facet of how you use the phone, and yet outside of social influencers selling an aesthetic no one really cares to take the time to customize. Even when entire theming libraries are available to swap fonts icons colors window styles etc at a tap, even navigating and selecting a pre-made is out of the minds of most people. Despite the availability, there will still be calls to "how phones used to have personality and style" and refer to old hello kitty flip phone designs, despite being able to accomplish everything it does on a modern device without needing to buy a specific piece of hardware to achieve it.

Why? Because I dont think most people ever actually cared about it. It became a "cool thing" to customize your MySpace or winamp, not something actually motivated by individual user behavior. The people calling for more customization options ignore the plethora of options available because what theyre wanting is a cultural shift, but everyone's attention is so divided that it feels like a waste of time to devote to something that doesnt bother you. You "miss" what you had despite never doing any work to understand it.

Re: Winamp Skin Museum

#57

Post by pooploop64 »

DaanDL wrote: post #21
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

Custom css email themes aka "stationary", which other people can see on emails from you. These are still a very prominent part of email but I don't see anyone expressing their individuality with it anymore. It feels like a huge blast from the past to get one with any kind of theme that doesn't look like something a bank would use.

There was also "smileys" but I never used those because smileys were considered tacky. Yet it's the thing that stuck harder than anything else.

Re: Winamp Skin Museum

#58

Post by ssl-3 »

gapan wrote: post #47
DaanDL wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, back then, it worked, because every app looked completely different from each other, and so it was a clusterfuck anyway :-D

So, same thing as today then?

Yes, except it was much more colorful and vibrant. We had pixel art instead of the the deliberately-monochromatic committee-directed stick-figure horrors of today.

Re: Winamp Skin Museum

#59

Post by captbaritone »

amarant wrote: post #43
DaanDL wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Custom, sometimes animated, mouse pointers! I remember them for rendering my computer almost unusable by eating up nearly all of the available compute... But my gosh it was pretty!

As part of building Webamp I did a side quest to enable rendering Windows animated cursor on the web. You can read about it here: https://jordaneldredge.com/rendering-animated-ani-cursors-in...
Post reply on HN