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They should have just slapped the Aero GUI on XP and called it Vista. It'd Just Work(tm) and it would still consume much less resources than Vista does now. Vista didn't even deliver most of the stuff like WinFS that was supposed to make the upgrade headache worthwhile. It did, however, include the latest and most virulent DRM as well as other non-critical crap.

Again, Microsoft, just put Aero on Windows XP as service pack 4, and then you can pretend that your customers really, really do prefer Vista over XP.

They don't even need Aero - the content already exists for XP. I just installed the phenomenal Area o4.2 Visual Style on an installation of XP SP2, and it looks and runs wonderfully. This is a reasonably helpful explanation of how to install non-MS visual styles in XP.* There are also various packages around to add widgets and other bits and pieces to give XP a convincingly Vista/Aero feel in terms of the desktop (Rainmeter or Samurize, for example).

Microsoft should absolutely get a few visual styles along these lines, integrate as many good known fixes and up to date drivers as possible into the base installation package, and release XP SP4 as a standalone product. If it makes them feel better, they can call it Windows Classic 08 or something and release it as a new product at a reasonable price (say, under $100). Hell, I'd buy it.

* NB - if you actually try installing the theme above following the instructions on the second site, note that you need to rename the .msstyles files to match the folder names (or vice-versa), it wouldn't work for me until I did this.

Litestep is a modular shell composed of many DLLs. There are multiple VWMs available for Litestep, with ckVWM and rabidVWM coming immediately to mind. I use rabidVWM myself, as it has native support for iconified windows in the VWM display (each window is a miniature picture of what the actual window looks like). I run a 2x2 VWM using a heavily modified austerity (the default) theme. I am working on creating a new theme that meets all of my needs, which is something I highly encourage all users of LiteStep to do, even if they start by simply modifying the austerity theme as I have.

As far as piecing together the latest version of Litestep, the installer here gives you 0.24.7 RC1, which you need to update manually to 0.24.7 Final from here, which is as simple as quitting litestep and using a couple explorer windows to drag and drop the updated files into the Litestep folder. As far as setting the shell, the installer gives you a "setshell" utility that modifies the registry and the win.ini file for you, to use whatever executable you specify. If you want your shell to be the World of Warcraft executable (I know somebody who did this, no joke) then that is totally fine and painlessly easy.

As noted here, a lot of the core modules are under heavy development for a 2006 release, and there's a new installer called LOSI (Litestep Open Source Installer) that is also under development.

I know you're trolling/joking, but Gaim does have plenty of simleys and sounds, and I'm sure the sounds, at least, will probably work just fine from Trillian.

Seriously, Konfabulator or DesktopX or Kapsules or Active Desktop or let's see if I can think of any more... Anyway, all of these I am certain have an audience. You have the skinning scene, the graphic artists, and basically Joe and Jane User who just like a "pretty" computer.

I have seen art released under the GPL, if you're including a bunch of .JPG or .BMP graphics for skinnable applications, with maybe a bit of .XML thrown in. (it's debatable if this counts as "A"rt, but legally, it certainly counts as "a"rt). This happens infrequently, but there are probably a dozen skins that have been released with the GPL bundled in, on sites such as Customize.org

http://www.customize.org/

Try
http://www.customize.org/list/rainlendar/0/10/date -desc/subliminal
for 1 example.

I actually started skinning another application in this style, then realized that its legal status would be uncertain at best. Since then, I've checked them out when I run across another one, and what's worse than the GPL itself is the original creator's posted e-mail is always one that's no longer valid or doesn't get responses.
My take on this is that if I were to release an animated .gif under the GPL, it's possible I'm also promising to keep the raw frames on file and send them to anyone asking for them. If I draw something in BMP format, and it undergoes a lossy compression, say to .JPG at 80% quality, maybe that would count, with the .BMP as 'source code'. I don't see how the GPL is intended to cover such situations, but if it somehow does, it opens up a whole new can of worms.
If this is somehow legally binding, I'm wondering what it might cover. Full images? Significant (?) parts of them? Layouts, such as for virtual buttons? I don't worry much about the 'viral' aspects of the GPL for code, but for applied art, if it actually covers it at all, 'viral' effects look to be pretty likely. I'm now hoping no lawyer gets this idea.

I have seen art released under the GPL, if you're including a bunch of .JPG or .BMP graphics for skinnable applications, with maybe a bit of .XML thrown in. (it's debatable if this counts as "A"rt, but legally, it certainly counts as "a"rt). This happens infrequently, but there are probably a dozen skins that have been released with the GPL bundled in, on sites such as Customize.org

http://www.customize.org/

Try
http://www.customize.org/list/rainlendar/0/10/date -desc/subliminal
for 1 example.

I actually started skinning another application in this style, then realized that its legal status would be uncertain at best. Since then, I've checked them out when I run across another one, and what's worse than the GPL itself is the original creator's posted e-mail is always one that's no longer valid or doesn't get responses.
My take on this is that if I were to release an animated .gif under the GPL, it's possible I'm also promising to keep the raw frames on file and send them to anyone asking for them. If I draw something in BMP format, and it undergoes a lossy compression, say to .JPG at 80% quality, maybe that would count, with the .BMP as 'source code'. I don't see how the GPL is intended to cover such situations, but if it somehow does, it opens up a whole new can of worms.
If this is somehow legally binding, I'm wondering what it might cover. Full images? Significant (?) parts of them? Layouts, such as for virtual buttons? I don't worry much about the 'viral' aspects of the GPL for code, but for applied art, if it actually covers it at all, 'viral' effects look to be pretty likely. I'm now hoping no lawyer gets this idea.

I like Smoke, and it's available for pretty much all of the Mozilla apps (including Thunderbird).

I've seen some pretty unusual Windows desktops at Customize.org which use third party applications to replace everything from the Windows shell to system fonts. There's a handy little utility called Resource Hacker which lets you edit Windows executable files, allowing almost infinite customization. Some of the finer results of using Resource Hacker can be seen in the tutorials here.

As for the UNIX desktop front, everything these days seems to want to copy the better points of the MacOS and Windows. A notable exception is XFCE which is a Gtk2/Gnomed clone of CDE. If you wanna see some odd attempts at user interfaces, I urge you to check out some of the others at http://www.plig.org/xwinman/ (yes the site still exists and is actually fairly recent). I honestly believe this site is a MUST READ for anyone that is going to use UNIX on the desktop).

However, Winamp has pretty much always been free as in beer. Even when they had registration, there was a distinction between the Lite version and the Pro version. At one point I think they were even planning to do "adware" though I'm not sure if a release with that was ever done.

Over here is a complete archive of Winamp releases, except the none of the frelling links work. But you can see the release history at least. At a certain point, Nullsoft was bought by AOL and thus didn't need to do the shareware/registration thing anymore.

As for Open Source, Nullsoft has released a lot of OpenSource stuff, pretty much all for Windows. The most useful being their installer program, I've seen a lot of freeware packages use NSIS. Here's all the programs Nullsoft has released recently. I've always liked Nullsoft's naming approach...

(Historical note: One of the most popular plugins for Winamp has been Geiss, developed by Mr. Ryan Geiss. He originally wrote it independently. Then he got a job with Creative Labs working on Oozic, Creative's own idea for a media player with nifty visuals. Oozic started life as Lava but had to change names, probably for trademark reasons. Sadly, Creative Tech turned asswipe with Oozic, declaring it only available for those who bought their hardware and had it on the driver CD. Anyways, Mr. Geiss left Creative to go work for Nullsoft! Where he developed some more nifty visualization tools such as Milkdrop and Geiss II.)

(BONUS Historical note: Before Winamp, before multi-media players with visualization plugins, there was Cthugha by Kevin "Zaph" Burfitt. Cthugha started life as a DOS freeware program that did pretty VGA animations in synch with music from an audio CD. Eventually a version was developed for Windows 95, and 3D support was even added providing you used a 3DFX card. Sadly the project has languished for years now but not before Kevin released source and a number of folks ported Cthugha to MacOS, Linux, Java and yes, even a Winamp plugin!)

Thats a misleading article.

They don't want you messing around with the functionality of the widgets. You know what? I agree with them.

Esp. since you can run other window managers under Darwin (uh .. right?), you still have choice.

And this article says nothing about them trying to prevent the kind of 'tweaking' most Wintel users use - namely, performance, setup, etc.

I don't have any problems with Apple trying to kill utilities that tweak the UI. There's still choice, and there wasn't in OS9.

As for Jobs saying, "Themes are dead", is he on crack? Or by dead, does he mean, "They're dead, because I killed them on this platform."?

> This all started with Apple's QT 4 player, which completely broke the highly regarded Apple Human Interface Guidelines and was put onto the Interface Hall of Shame just for that. Then Winamp came out, creating one of the first in-app skinnable applications, which is cool, but led everyone to release skinnable apps, such as Windows Media Player, and a lot of similar ones on the *NIX side.

Actually, WinAmp 1.2 (the first to have skinning) came out (April 8, 1998) a while before QuickTime 4 did (preview release: May 1999.) kjofol had app-level skinning in a media player even before this, before the author was hired by Nullsoft.

There was a pretty vibrant Windows skinning community in 1998, mostly because of things like LiteStep.

> I'd rather see more effort here with Moz and other programs to provide this, though with much effort, than to keep on reinventing customization wheels that are inconsistant with the OS's customization.

But many other people like app-level skinning.

One extremely bored weekend, on a win2k box..

VMware with redhat linux running UAE
Vmware with Win98SE for games.
BaliskII with net access running os8
WinUAE playing .mods

Then,
Running VNC to my linux box with IceWM with qnx theme.
Running VNC to my wifes 98se box
My linux box mounting my Win2k drives with sharity
My win2k box mounting my linux boxes with samba
Xwin32 running a file manager on the unix box that was looking at my win2k mounted drives.
Netscape exported back.
Running eFX with enlightenment skin.
Exporting Gimp back and viewing pictures on my local drives.
Mirc in desktop mode with transparency.
tclock for looks and to replace the start button.
econsole - I use dterm for win32 now.
And when not listening to mods, Sonique with background visuals.

Lots of cool stuff out there, emulators for almost everything, mame/consoles/64/amiga/atari/mac/apple/etc..
And tons of programs to make windows look the way you want, or even go wild with litestep/graphite/etc..

If your interested in tweaking and shell enhacements check out Shell City daily updates with new programs.
Customize.org and Floachs site are a must visit also.

Howdy. Thanks for the good reply, btw..

You wrote,

You mention skinning, and I fail to see how amazingly innovative skinning is. Skins in their present form (XMMS, Mozilla) are nothing but different ways of presenting the same information. So the button is blue with white stripes instead of grey. Maybe the buttons are arranged differently, I could almost see how this could help target different groups of users by stressing different parts of the UI. But we're still in the WIMP paradigm that has been only slightly modified since the original Macs."

I don't mean to sound snotty or holier-than-thou by pointing this out, but the two examples you list (XMMS and Mozilla) are hardly representative of what can be done these days..Also, it says to me that you aren't really aware of whats being done with skins these days. Most of it is taking place in the Win32 world, so, its not surprising most Linux guys aren't fully aware of it..Myself included, up till a few months ago. It's really amazing.

Skins used to be a purely cosmetic thing.. Literally, as you point out, just changing the appearance of things, and only that. This is naturally what happens when people add skinning functionality to their pre-existing applications as an afterthought. More and more these days, coders are building their apps from the start with skinning in mind, to allow things beyond simple cosmetic changes. Nowadays, we're talking full modification of the interface itself. Anything and everything can be rearranged, reshaped, and moved, changed and resized to suit the user's own preferences. In some cases, the functionality of the underlying application can even be added to, with the introduction of a new skin.

Here are some resources you might want to look at in the meantime.

Deskmod

Skinz.org

dTOP

Customize.org

Ciao ciao,

Bowie J. Poag

That's strange: I've used the nightly binaries and just built the current CVS, and they both run circles around communicator 4.6. (I haven't bothered to upgrade to 4.7's bugs yet) As an example, load Mozilla M13 or M14 and look at a graphics-intensive site like the Wallpapers section at customize.org. or any of the themes.org sites. It takes about 1.5 minutes to render a 20-image page from customize.org on Netscape, and less than half that on Mozilla. Slashdot and other text-heavy sites seem close to equal on both browsers.

For the people keeping score at home, that's Netscape Communicator 4.61 and Mozilla current CVS configured with --disable-mailnews --disable-debug --enable-x11-shm, on a P200 running Linux 2.2.13

How many lawsuits has Apple filed since the iMac release? Quite a few. Why so many? Because now that Apple is back and competitive again, they want to prove it by swinging their legal stick at anything that may involve and iMac but not produced by Apple. Even something silly like an Aqua skin for windows. I agree, it's an assinine idea, but a team of Apple's lawyers shouldn't be stifling the creativity (or lack of) of skinners out there.

Another note:
What about this: here is a link to several iMac winamp skins:
http://www.customiz e.org/view.pl?iMac%20Collection%3A%3Awinamp2
shouldn't these also be scrutinized?

Thanks for reading
ope

Well, I don't think I saw this posted before. Most people seem to go for a system with multiple ways of rating posts. I agree with those who point out that it would make filtering posts more difficult.

My suggestion is very simple: why not have TWO ratings per post? One of them would be the rating system that's currently on use, enforced by moderators.

The other score would be one based on the "popularity" of the post, just like some download sites rate their offerings (i.e. customize.org). Every post would present both the moderated score and the voted score, and you would be able to set up your preferences so as to display:
Moderated: 2 and up

Voted: 3 and up


or whatever combination of the two you liked.

How to vote? Well, each post could include a check-box or a drop-down box, or something to the effect. Readers could check each post as they read them, and there would be a submit button at the very end of the page.

This way, readers could vote for as many posts as they wanted, whithout having to submit their vote for every single one. Also, only those readers interested in voting would take the "trouble" to scroll to the end of the page and submit.

And finally, only registered users would be allowed to vote for posts, and of course they could only vote once.

The advantages I see to this system are:
1) You can rely on moderators to initialy rate posts.
2) The moderator system provides a somewhat more imparcial rating system, because the karma system ensures only "responsible" slashdot users get to rate the posts. (Ok, so far these are advantages of the current system).
3) The voted rating ensures you get to read comments that most people aggree they're good (or bad, it all depends on your kinks ;). Since one tends to read the forums with the content with which one agrees, this is a huge plus.
4) The voting system would allow us lame posters, who probably will never get enough points to be moderators, to express out loud our sentiment/adhesion/rejection/whatever towards what we read. It would also (hopefully) help reduce the "I agree/way to go" types.
5)This further reinforces the "peer-review" system we all like slashdot for, and gives you one more benefit to being a registered user.

Just my two cents.

Imagine trying to use KDE, GNOME, Enlightment, FVWM, etc. right out of the box without customizing it.... same thing!

I'm a devteam member for the Litestep project. Litestep is a "shell" for Windows. This is basically like a window manager for X, but instead of its main focus being the drawing and interaction of windows on the screen, a shell's main purpose is to present the user with an interface to the programs on the computer (For instance, Windows Explorer is a shell that organizes programs through the Start Menu, desktop icons, and a taskbar).

Litestep offers a way to totally customize your desktop. The way Litestep works is everything is loaded as an external module (sort of like AfterStep) and given a configuration. Among the available modules is a Virtual Window Manager. It comes with the default Litestep configuration, and also comes with almost 100% of themes available for Litestep.

Also, Litestep is a GPLed program, and many modules for Litestep are available under the GPL as well. Many thememakers out there will also be honored if you use their theme, splicing it to your purposes.

For more information about Litestep, visit the following locations:

• Litestep.Com (the official homepage).
• Litestep.Org (partner of Litestep.Com - more help and news here)
• Customize.Org (a site devoted to skins and themes for themeable applications for Win32)
• Skintacular (a site akin to Customize.Org)