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."

Comments

PNG, great.

[al.cx]

Perhaps PNG support in IE will have been improved then; this is good news for web designers.

( http://entropymine.com/jason/testbed/pngtrans/ )

The real issue....

[Kid Brother of St. A]

...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).

Priorities

[TheVidiot]

get started on creating your own Longhorn skins.
How about I get the OS first?

what the...

[Underholdning]

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)

Re:what the...

[PhrostyMcByte]

It's not about the technology present in skinning, but the fact that they've circumvented MS's encryption/signing thingy 2 years prior to release.

The current Longhorn releases feature the same UI system as XP, using static images for everything.

The final release will have an Avalon-powered UI. Because it uses DirectX, its a safe bet they will use scalable vector graphics (more flash-like, no BMP/PNG/JPG) for everything possible. The ability to resize windows has already been demonstrated, and keeping the UI clean and un-pixely is probably a big priority for them.

I would be *very* surprised if the Avalon UI uses the same theming system. All they've done is apply an old crack to old code. Nothing amazing there...

Re:Planning for the future?

[VertigoAce]

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).

Re:Skin the crash screens, too?

[Mr_Silver]

I want to skin my windows crash screens, can I do that too? It'd be great to skin the crash screen to look just like the regular o/s, so I get the impression that everything is fine.

I'm not sure if you're trolling or trying to be funny, but never mind.

However, you can actually change the colour of the BSOD to make it more PSOD (pink screen of death) or maybe YSOD (yellow screen of death).

Details are here although many Slashdotters probably won't like to admit that on W2K/XP they might never actually see the fruits of their labour.

Can it be?

[-kertrats-]

Slashdot posting a positive article about a Windows OS? [regardless of the fact its years away from release, and still in extremely early alpha stages]. Slashdot, this is so unlike you. Where are the backhand comments against M$? Where are the links with Better Operating systems? I'm ashamed of you. Where's your prejudice? Where's your bias?