Thank you so much for this.
Those were the days. When software aimed to the general crowds were making huge leaps in all fronts at insane speed. So much nostalgia, a couple of my favourite skins are featured at the top.
The MP3 explosion in 98-99 was crazy. While online video got into our lives incrementally over the course of two decades, the introduction of mp3 was metheoric. In mater of months, almost anyone could download, store or even produce sound files just with their computer. Allo of this at a perfectly fine quality taking up 10 times less disk space than with previous formats.
A couple of years after windows xp is released, polished with all the features the user wanted: an image viewer, the reference web browser at the time, a media player and an email client.
What happened? Why did the industry stop giving the people what they want and need? Where, when and why did we lost track?
Winamp is still to this day my favourite piece of software. Fast, light, pragmatic, feature rich, resource efficient, configurable. It really whips the llama’s ass!
It really was fantastic! How would one go about making winamp-inspired software today I wonder… What UI library or toolkit (if any) makes it possible (if not easy) to make such fun, lightweight, powerful interfaces? The playfulness is sorely missed in todays desktop software.
I think this kind of creative play is still possible in web development if you’re willing to eschew all the performance-optimizing complexity, deep state graph management, and avoidance of “ugly” hacks like table layouts and single-browser CSS that big FE frameworks + UI toolkits bring with them. Just throw down some markup and styling and bang on some JS until it all hangs together. (Odds are even without strict adherence to web standards your random demo will still work in mainstream browsers 5-10 years hence, which is more than you can say for most desktop app “skins”.)
Beyond that, some experiments with one of the WebGL+Canvas-targeting immediate-mode UI toolkits popular around these parts and /r/rust might be just the thing the get the creativity flowing if you want an even more open sandbox. :)
FWIW I still use Winamp on Windows and Audacious, an OSS clone, on Linux! Audacious is pretty nice, though it has a perplexing implementation that relies heavily on dbus.
My favourite modern skin is still Drone. I recently installed Winamp on my windows box because it’s still a great media player and …. man no one though of HighDPI back then. I still use it whenever I switch over to Windows. It might be tiny and in the corner, but I can still read it, I know all my hotkeys, and it’s still a good audio player.
Thank you so much for this. Those were the days. When software aimed to the general crowds were making huge leaps in all fronts at insane speed. So much nostalgia, a couple of my favourite skins are featured at the top.
The MP3 explosion in 98-99 was crazy. While online video got into our lives incrementally over the course of two decades, the introduction of mp3 was metheoric. In mater of months, almost anyone could download, store or even produce sound files just with their computer. Allo of this at a perfectly fine quality taking up 10 times less disk space than with previous formats.
A couple of years after windows xp is released, polished with all the features the user wanted: an image viewer, the reference web browser at the time, a media player and an email client. What happened? Why did the industry stop giving the people what they want and need? Where, when and why did we lost track?
Winamp is still to this day my favourite piece of software. Fast, light, pragmatic, feature rich, resource efficient, configurable. It really whips the llama’s ass!
It really was fantastic! How would one go about making winamp-inspired software today I wonder… What UI library or toolkit (if any) makes it possible (if not easy) to make such fun, lightweight, powerful interfaces? The playfulness is sorely missed in todays desktop software.
I think this kind of creative play is still possible in web development if you’re willing to eschew all the performance-optimizing complexity, deep state graph management, and avoidance of “ugly” hacks like table layouts and single-browser CSS that big FE frameworks + UI toolkits bring with them. Just throw down some markup and styling and bang on some JS until it all hangs together. (Odds are even without strict adherence to web standards your random demo will still work in mainstream browsers 5-10 years hence, which is more than you can say for most desktop app “skins”.)
Beyond that, some experiments with one of the WebGL+Canvas-targeting immediate-mode UI toolkits popular around these parts and /r/rust might be just the thing the get the creativity flowing if you want an even more open sandbox. :)
I do use tables for layout, but otherwise agree. My sites work in mosaic, Netscape, ie, and modern chrome too
FWIW I still use Winamp on Windows and Audacious, an OSS clone, on Linux! Audacious is pretty nice, though it has a perplexing implementation that relies heavily on dbus.
XMMS could be skinned, probably x11amp as well. To answer your question I guess Gtk offers this ability
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You should know that you can use these skins with Audacious.
There are tons of Winamp skins but really nice looking ones are VERY RARE.
Lots of them aren’t great. But what you’re seeing there is computing made accessible to all, and I think that’s admirable.
“Subtlety” was not a thing in early consumer computing.
…There’s so much concentrated video-game-nerd in here I subconciously found myself looking for an Undertale skin.
https://archive.org/details/winampskins
I don’t know if I will every be able to read “skin museum” and not have a bit of a shudder of horror.
(I love the site, though!)
My favourite modern skin is still Drone. I recently installed Winamp on my windows box because it’s still a great media player and …. man no one though of HighDPI back then. I still use it whenever I switch over to Windows. It might be tiny and in the corner, but I can still read it, I know all my hotkeys, and it’s still a good audio player.
Excuse me, but 1024x768 is high dpi
I definitely spent some time using this one.