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Isn't 'oo-BOON-too' and "Ooo-buhn-two." pretty much the same?

What, can't afford the $4.95 for a high tech Cellphone Signal Booster
And don't be suckered in by the scammers selling 1st 2nd or 3rd generation boosters. Insist on 4th generation technology!

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.

POV rules.

It's EASY to bring current machines to a grinding halt with POV-Ray. I was doing some weird experimentation last year... one image featured about forty intersecting glass planes and a bunch of fog and lighting effects. A very low quality rendering at only 640x480 on five networked machines ranging from 500MHz to 1.2GHz (with workloads split according to CPU power) took six days to render. A back-of-the-envelope calculation put a high-quality anti-aliased 1024x768 render at close to a month of round-the-clock processing.

I figure I'll go back and try this again when my slowest machine is 1.7GHz, I've got a couple of old 2.2GHz boxes laying around, and my main machine is 5GHz or so. Seriously.

Here's a cool POV wallpaper I submitted to skinz.org which I completed just before I gave up on that big project above...

http://www.skinz.org/skin.phtml?skinid=1131

flog(if(horse=="dead")then return horse);

Some alternatives to "Themes.org" are Deskmod, Skinz, my own site, System 26, and numerous other sites in the skinning community. They all accept and support Linux windowmanager themes, as well as KDE and GNOME themes, and have been around for quite a while now.

Cheers,

Well, the source is not that wacked. Yes, it has some artifacts, but not all that much to justify an increase of 80%. Enough with talking, see it for yourself.

I'm not sure if this relates to the same problem with mp3's -> ogg's. In this case, the main problem is that we "transcode" from a lossy format to another, thence, we loose even more audio quality than a wav -> mp3 encoding, but still we have a smaller file size.

I know this isn't what you were talking about, but check out this and this. *Laugh*

I know this isn't what you were talking about, but check out this and this. *Laugh*

The Windows (as in, Win32) customization scene has been around for a long time.

There are many programs out there that allow you to change their interface, sometimes only in how they look (WinAmp), but other times in how they act (K-Jofol).

Within the past few years, there have been a number of "shells" that have come out that allow you to ditch explorer (the start menu / taskbar / desktop combination) and use your own interface, like an X-Windows window manager.

Microsoft is trying to have the best of both worlds - a standardized user interface, with the ability to change it all. Personally, I don't think it's gonna work very well, but that may be just because I used to be on the Litestep development team.

Obligatory links:
Skinz.org
DeskMod
Litestep.net
desktopian.org

And those link to many more...

You'd think that after web users have been exposed to ad banners on web sites, Eudora, Cute FTP, and any number of other "free" software packages, they'd be used to the notion that good software doesn't come free -- unless you're Microsoft, and you can afford it. Netscape tries to make money from their web site. This is how they get people there.

Besides, the links are all part of the skin. It's only a matter of time before Skinz.org fills up with Netscape skins that lack all the self-promotion. If you're halfway clever, you can even start hacking the code and doing it yourself.

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

There was a big stink at skinz.org over the WinAqua skin for WindowBlinds; Apple seemed to drop their objections to that skin as soon as the author removed the logo.

I believe you're looking for this post; the animation is of the graphic in a sawmill theme, not winaqua at skinz.

If you weant to see the source then head on over to skinz.org and take a look for yourself. There is a whole lot of source your looking for there.

Well, looks like I'll be booting back into windows to take the bitch out. There are, btw, far better Mp3 players for windows - K-Jofol and Sonique come to mind. You can find links and resources on them at Skinz. Most of my Mp3s I play in BeOS, though, because of the added filesystem attributes for Mp3, and Soundplay, the greatest mp3 player ever.

So long, Winamp, and thanks for all the skins...

-lx