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Longhorn Skinning A Reality
AlphaAlien writes "AlphaAlien of HardwareGeeks.com has figured out how to skin all of Microsoft's upcoming Windows release codenamed Longhorn. We can now skin Longhorn in the same manner we can skin Windows XP. Here's a picture of a very early copy of the first ever non-Microsoft skin for Longhorn. The only possible issue at this point is that Microsoft appears to be planning to move away from BMP based skinning altogethor and move to PNG based skins in which case any skins made for Longhorn at this point in time will not work far into the future. Also the patch to allow the skins to be loaded may not work many builds from the present as well. But for now we'll be able to hack away at the skinning engine at our leisure. in co-operation with BetasIRC.net we will be releasing the first few longhorn skins and a guide on how to get started on creating your own Longhorn skins."
looks just like XP. I was hoping for something better - I thought there'd be hardware-accelerated coolness all over the place.
so why the fuck is it taking them another 2 years to get this on the shelves?
Perhaps PNG support in IE will have been improved then; this is good news for web designers.
( http://entropymine.com/jason/testbed/pngtrans/ )
...for me isn't how pretty I can get an OS to look, but how well it works. If I can put all kinds of skins on Longhorn, but it runs as slow as molasses and crashes at the drop of a hat, then MS will have wasted their time developing this thing. On the other hand if Longhorn turns out to be a nice, stable, functional OS that happens to be skinnable then Linux will have some real competition (which is good for both OS's).
get started on creating your own Longhorn skins.
How about I get the OS first?
I'll rejoice at them using open standards on the day they fix IE so that you don't need to use an arcane DXImage loader incantation when you put a png with an alpha channel on a site....
I don't get it. This is news about a feature in an OS that's not available yet, and when it's available, that feature will have changed? Excuse me, but what the heck is this about? (I'm not trying to sound like a troll - I'm really confused)
Underholdning.info
I don't think it's really planning for the future. It sounds like a few people who have beta copies of Longhorn are interested in skinning them. These are the same kinds of people that would skin KDE or Gnome as soon as they got it as well (the fact that they have Windows set up to use Firefox as the default web browser is an indicator that they like to customize their system).
Is this feature really going to be popular? Honestly, I'd love to hear what makes customizable skins so desirable.
>> "What would the robut do? Frame someone!"
Many people - like I - probably feel insulted with the XP 'Fisher Price' interface. I mean they could at least pretend they've not designed it for users that have the computer knowledge of a four-year old.
Atheism is a non-prophet organisation
The first thing that they teach students in a graphic arts class is to never use primary colors together. WinXP is just that (I'm not sure about Longhorn). And then Microsoft, with the billions of dollars in free cash, gives us all a WHOLE TWO FREAKING color schemes to choose from.
Tell me again why monopolies are good?
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
My droning, long hours in highschool agriculture class covered the Longhorn cattle. Transporting anything with horns that big was dangerous and cumbersome. "Polled" or hornless cattle came into fashion in the cattle industry in short order.
Why has Microsoft's marketing team picked the name of an animal that was proven in the marketplace to be 1. difficult to transport (picture horns sticking out of cattle cars or OS boxes sticking out of Fed Ex trucks) 2. difficult to maneuver without being gored?
I guess Longhorn isn't as new of an OS as we might have been led to think This is all beginning to sound rather familiar if you get my "point" :P
Harpo Tunnel Syndrome--my wrist feels funny.
And the reason they would spend time and money making skins when people will churn them out for free is?
No, this is your basic 'look at me, look how cool I am and you're not' type BS. Much in the same way a dog wants to impress its owner.
Afterall, if this person were truly part of the Longhorn beta, they would be bound be a NDA and not able to speak of it.
"...Microsoft becomes friendly with Sun?.."
:)
Never confuse long-term, cloaked malice with cash-wrapped friendliness
You are saying that KDE is better looking that XP? You must be using some way future version that I am not aware of. Ignoring for a moment the fact that it is pretty much a clone of Windows in look and feel - it is still very much a clutzy, quirky, inconsistent work in progress. I think even the developers would agree on that.
The first thing that they teach students in a graphic arts class is to never use primary colors together.
I hope they dont teach this in ART class. Who says you need to bind creativity? I dont need my Art spoon fed to me, let them design as they see fit... I dont need some group-think confining my options, in ANY regard.
Absolute rules are to be broken absolutely.
And keep in mind that graphic arts is about melding discordant shapes and images in a seamless fashion. User interface design is about demarcating where one conceptual function ends and another begins.
Which is the whole problem with skins. Skin artist makes this beautiful brushed metal design, and then can't figure out where his scrollbars are.
Apple done it right. Backgrounds are dull whites or brushed metal, but foregrounds are bright, gaudy mixes of whitish and bluish with big colorful icons. Shit, the three window accessory buttons (minimize, resize and close) are red, yellow and green.
XP is of course a mess, but not because of the colors. XP is a mess because it replaces the simple icons and buttons with a shitload of text and an obnoxious dog. People don't want to read a short novel and wrestle Bonzi Buddy just to install a printer.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
I'd suggest that for a lot of UI elements it would actually be better to use a vector-based format like SVG. Although I'm sure MS will use something like XAML (another link).
Why is microsoft against the idea of the user customizing the look of his/her desktop?
This just doesnt seem like a big deal to me. Every other gui in the world allows the user to change the look. Why is microsoft afraid of letting the user do this?
I was under the impression that Longhorn would be using vector graphical extensively in its UI. Mind you, I don't follow Microsoft hype very closely so I may well be totally wrong.
:P
It will. This is one of the beta builds. I've seen at least three MSDN videos showcasing the technology...clearly, people on this site haven't been paying attention.
All the questions and comments similar to this one in this discussion really reveal how absolutely uninformed about Longhorn Slashdotters are as they meanwhile bash it. Common knowledge about Longhorn seems to have not yet reached Slashdot--no doubt because Slashdot would rather post silly anti-"M$" article when meanwhile, great strides are taking place in their technology. Someone here actually implied you'd need a DirectX9 level card just to run the thing--obviously he didn't know Longhorn supports several tiers of operation, going all the way down to standard 2D like Windows 2000. You can choose a tier manually or let Longhorn decide for you according to system specs. This is just one example of bizarre posts that completely reveal how ignorant people are of this OS--they call it "vaporware" as though there is no information released about it. People, there is tons of info already known that Microsoft has given away freely in the past year.
For crying out loud, visit WinSuperSite and read up a little bit!
Oh come on. Look at music theory: if you break the rules you end up with a mess. Ask around and find out how many people love Schoenberg, a guy who broke all the rules that were developed for hundred of years.
The rules are there because smart people figured out that if you do things a certain way, they make sense to our feeble minds. And if you don't, you end up with something that makes our brain cry in anguish. In any case, the rules are free-form enough that you can do a lot with them.
Make music that breaks the rules, you get garbage. Make art that breaks the rules, you get Longhorn. Either way, it's not a satisfactory result.
That image doesn't look very skinned to me. It appears the colors have changed, and perhaps some minor UI elements have changed, but I can't really tell. It really just looks like Longhorn with different colors to me. Perhaps the skin is just very similar and I'd have to compare side by side. I couldn't find any details on how and what they did in the article.
Refer to an MS product 2 years from release as "revolutionary". Is that the "Gates Vision(tm)"?
Recount the wonders of product demos that have been shown at recent MS developer conferences.
Regularly visit MSDN _for fun_.
Refer to a GUI as "photorealistic".
Look at how many market-speak words you use. If you are not astroturfing, then at least you have bought into the PR buzz that MS creates through MSDN - yes, MSDN is a marketing outlet. It is not the unmediated look at "technology", "for hardcore developers" that some seem to think it is.
I'm just saying, beware. Do you remember Win95? Everything that they promised was doable - it wasn't fantastic. They just failed to implement it. They failed to turn it into a product. And so far as I am concerned, MS may very will fail again this time. It is too far off.
And you haven't even seen this product, supposedly. The longhorn release is up to 2 years away still, and many of these technologies are still in development. Certainly they do not exist in a coherent whole, at least visible to anyone outside of Microsoft.