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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."
I hope this means they will support full PNG transparancy in new versions of IE in preparation for this new feature - that would make it worthwhile for other purposes too.
And the whole point of a server is to provide....services to other computers, not to provide pretty eye candy for some newbie admin.
This is one of the things Microsoft doesn't get. When I build a Sun or Linux production server, the only software on it is the software needed to provide the services the server was built for. Web servers don't neeed GUIs, browsers, or media playsers. Database servers don't need GUIs, , browsers, or media playsers. Application servers don't need GUIs, browsers, or media playsers. I might use a GUI to attach and manage them, but the servers themselves don't need one.
This type of thinking will continue to be Microsoft's security and performance nightmare. If there is a security hole in Mozilla, I don't need to worry about it on my production servers because it ain't there. If there is a security problem with Apache, I don't need to worry about it except on the webserver because it ain't on the app server or DB server. It doesn't take up memory, diskspace or CPU cycles either.
Even offloaded CPU cycles take up CPU cycles at some point, either to issue the instructions or to move on to the next ones. Something has to tell the server the mouse just oved over that pretty icon and to use a few CPU cycles to tell the graphic card to make it flutter in the breeze.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
I had to do some research on colour use in GUI's for a class. Before that I never understood why the XP theme uses those butt ugly colours....well it turns out that they were carefully considered.
The lense focuses light on a portion of the retina called the fovea. The fovea exclusivly contains red and green cones with the green cones accounting for aprox 2/3 of the population. Blue cones are totaly absent from this area. The implications are that the eye is drawn to green colours. Hense we have that ugly green start button. The blue background is also due to cone distrubution, because we don't have blue cones in the fovea, our eyes are not drawn to blue. This makes blue colours ideal for backgrounds.
There are other considerations, such as value (brighness) and saturation (how pure the colour is). Basicly, bright, highly saturated greens draw our attention while dark, poorly saturated blue colours blend into the background and go unnoticed.
Absolute rules are to be broken absolutely.
You can't really break a rule unless you know it's a rule.
We see the world through cultural and physiological biases, and those ever-changing biases have been studied for millenia by artist-scientist types. These teachings are employed by artist-engineer types to express a message as effectively as possible.
For example, to add tension, you can use angular shapes, discordant color combinations, and uneven spacing. If tension is useful to your artistic message, use them. If tension is antithetical to your message, then don't use them.
If you don't learn what these "rules" are, then you'll be stuck with the scattershot or monte carlo approach at communication. Sometimes effective, sometimes not effective, and sometimes counter-productive.
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