![]() The problem with objects,widgets, and gadgets is that there’s only a handful of things that make sense as gadgets. DesktopX has remained in statis for the past couple of years with version 4 only recently having gone into beta. Microsoft, having copied the gadget concept from Apple without knowing why largely abandoned them in Windows 7. Konfabulator was eventually sold to Yahoo who promptly sat on it (yahoo hasn’t updated the Yahoo Widgets page to say whether it supports Windows 7 or not). Microsoft, copying Apple, then put “gadgets” into Windows later on. The Konfabulator team, by contrast, came from a design background and made sure Konfabulator came with prettier and more interesting default content.Īpple then came along and ripped off the concept (yes Apple fans, I said ripped off) and stuffed widgets into the OS. Developer Stardock came from an engineering background – tech tech tech. But Konfabulator kicked DesktopX’s butt in terms of popularity. 3 years later, the second program of the new genre arrived – Konfabulator.ĭesktopX was more powerful – it supported C++ plugins and could build desktops and create (with the Pro version) stand-alone programs. The decade saw the release of DesktopX which allowed users to build their own desktops through objects which could also be exported as stand alone mini-applications (later called widgets). ![]() Widgets, Gadgets, Objects = cool technologies looking for a practical use. In 2007, Winamp 5.5 was released which helped make it feature competitive with other players. Unfortunately, it’s fate has been largely tied to its popularity as a media player which has seen a decline as iTunes slowly took over and Windows Media player finally got to be “good enough”. Winamp is a media player that became very popular in the late 90s and helped popularize the term “skinning” in the first place. You can’t seriously do one of these skinning lists without mentioning Winamp. This strategy has led to its continued popularity to this day. WinStep isn’t a replacement shell as much as it is a way to extend Explorer. Hoverdesk became popular for a time but ceased development in 2003. Its popularity has declined as Windows explorer improved and system memory has increased but it remains in active development to this date. The Windows shell was, for the time, bloated, slow, and feature poor. Back in 2000, Litestep had a significant following. No list would be complete without talking about Litestep, the shell that let users replace Explorer. ![]() Without uxtheme and msstyles, I think it’s safe to say that skinning would never have gotten as popular as it did. What can be said is that msstyle skinners helped enrich the skinning community with some great designs. Many flame wars ensued over whether it was a good idea to patch system files. It didn’t take long before uxtheme was cracked to allow for additional skins which paved the way for programs like Style XP and a cottage industry of third-party msstyles. Unexpectedly, having created an engine that could do skinning, Microsoft never went beyond the Luna skin and locked the file format. Where WindowBlinds used wblind.dll Microsoft went with uxtheme.dll. ![]() One presumes Microsoft has access to the Windows source but instead chose to implement skinning the same way Stardock did – by creating a DLL that hooks to every process and intercepts paint calls to draw a skin for a file. Unfortunately, the method WindowBlinds used was done because developer Stardock didn’t have access to the Windows source code. In 2000, Microsoft liked the idea of WindowBlinds so much that they decided to use its implementation as the basis for a new skinning system in Windows XP. The success of WindowBlinds sparked a cottage industry of skinning programs but none (so far) have rivaled WindowBlinds in terms of sheer popularity.Īs WindowBlinds reached the end of the decade, it had seen the release of 4 new operating systems – Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7 and it’s still going strong.Īs much as I’d like to pretend otherwise, GUI skinning can’t be discussed without talking about uxtheme patching. WindowBlinds demonstrated both the marvels of skinning and its occasional depravity by letting users completely change the look and feel of the Windows GUI. No discussion of skinning would be complete without WindowBlinds. Let’s take a look at some of the highs and lows of skinning for the past decade. In that time, we’ve seen skinning rise from being a power user niche to being mainstream and now returning to being a power user niche again.
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