The World Of “Skinning” an introductory primer!
How Customized graphical user interfaces are taking over!
What Skinning means to everyone
In the old DOS days, every program had its own user interface and it was a mess to learn how to use them. When Windows and OS/2 became widely used on PCs, graphical user interfaces became the norm and interface standardization finally arrived.
Today, with millions of people using these GUIs, we’ve come to learn that we’ve gone too far towards GUI standardization. Not only do most programs look the same but most systems look the same. Users, having learned how to use their programs and having to deal with these programs many hours per day want to be able to control how they look. Cars no longer look all the same, why should computer programs? Hence, the current skinning craze…
A brief history
The term skinning is believed to have originally come from Quake – the video game. Quake is a first person shooter where each person is represented by a character who runs around shooting things. But to give each character their own uniqueness, Id invented “skins” where the user could put together a pre-packaged set of graphics that when loaded changed the look of the character. And so the most basic definition of a skin is a pre-packaged set of graphics to change the look and feel of something.
But it didn’t take too long for skinning to jump beyond that one game and soon an entire subculture was created making skins for various programs including utilities and applications.
Arguably one of the first programs to really get skinning going on the PC was Winamp. Winamp is a popular MP3 music player that allows itself to be visually customized by applying a skin. The skinning feature of Winamp set it apart from the dozens of other MP3 players available and set it on the course to become the most popular Mpeg player in the world. It was recently acquired by AOL of somewhere between $70 million and $120 million. Skinning apparently pays well.
2 skins of Winamp in action
Once Winamp’s popularity started to soar, a host of companies got into the act including one called Sonique which now rivals Winamp in popularity.
Sonique allows itself to be heavily customized.
One of the earlier companies to see the potential of skinning was Neoplanet. Neoplanet is a custom web browser that uses the Internet Explorer or Netscape engine and allows itself to be customized through skins. Neoplanet recently announced a $17 million investment from a third party that only fuels the perceived value of customizable interfaces.
But skinning doesn’t have to be restricted to just particular kinds of applications. The freeware program Litestep has arguably done more than anything else to create a vibrant “skinning” community of users who are interested in customizing the look and feel of their systems. Litestep is a shell that replaces Explorer.exe and allows itself to have its own “themes” to control the look and feel of the shell. While technically it is not skinning anything, it did put into place the unique blend of artistic and technical expertise necessary to make skinning on a large scale a reality.
A user puts it all together. WindowBlinds, Litestep, Neoplanet, and Winamp all together to create the ultimate desktop.
For a long while, skinning was limited to applications that had a specific purpose and used skinning as an extra feature (like Winamp and Neoplanet for instance). But recently, Stardock released WindowBlinds, a component of its upcoming Object Desktop operating environment for Windows.
WindowBlinds, being the visual enhancement portion of Object Desktop, allows users to change the look and feel of Windows itself – i.e. instead of skinning a particular application, WindowBlinds skins virtually every application on the system.
“It would be a wonderful marketing strategy to say that we looked at all this and said ‘You know, what would be even cooler than all this would be a program that skins everything and not just an individual program.’ In such a scenario, WindowBlinds becomes the ultimate trump card. But that’s not how it happened,” said Kris Kwilas, External Development Manager at Stardock.
When WindowBlinds began development in mid 1997, Litestep, Neoplanet, Winamp, and skinning in general were either not in existence on the PC or so into their infancy that few people were aware of them (including Stardock). Stardock’s successful Object Desktop on OS/2 allowed users to change the look and feel of OS/2. So when it began creating Object Desktop on Windows, it was a natural decision to allow users to change the look and feel of Windows via DIMs (Dynamic Interface Modules). And WindowBlinds (then called WindowFX at Stardock) certainly wasn’t targeting end users, it was supposed to be for corporations looking to brand their PCs with a custom look. In mid 1998, it became apparent that skinning was becoming popular and that there was a rising demand to have programs that customized the look and feel of Windows like what one could do on Linux. That’s when Stardock teamed up with Neil Banfield who was working on his own skinning program.
WindowBlinds was released to the general public in early October and by mid November accumulated over 1.3 million downloads at C-net’s download.com and received numerous awards (ZDNet 5 stars, “Pick” by C-net, A+ from ActiveWindows, Editor’s Choice from PC World, “Try it” from WinFiles.com).
When one combines the popularity of Winamp, Neoplanet, WindowBlinds and the dozens of programs that allow themselves to be skinned, the net result is a movement that is gaining momentum at a rapid pace.
“Millions of people have come to the conclusion that they are tired of being told how their programs should look and feel,” says Damian Hodgkiss, webmaster of Skinz.org, the leading skin repository on the Internet.
The Future of Skinning
There’s no doubt that skinning has taken off. The statistics are amazing.
The top 5 skinning programs currently have massive downloads*:
Program Downloads Description
#1
Winamp: 9 million downloads. Skinnable mpeg player (skins itself)
#2
Sonique: 2.9 million downloads Skinnable mpeg player (skins
itself)
#3
WindowBlinds: 1.5 million downloads Skinner (skins all programs)
#4
Neoplanet: 1.2 million downloads Skinnable web browser (skins
itself)
#5
ICQPlus: 1.1 million downloads Skinner (skins ICQ)
Bear in mind that all these programs other than Winamp became available
in 1999, WindowBlinds itself only became generally available as a 1.0 product
in October of 1999.
Figure 1 WindowBlinds can turn any
window into looking any way you want it to.
Resources on the web:
|
Website |
Description |
|
Leading repository for skins of
all kind |
|
|
Stardock’s
home page for WindowBlinds |
|
|
Another popular website for
skinning. It was the first website dedicated to skinning. |
|
|
The home of Winamp, the most
popular skinnable mp3 player. |
|
|
Home of news on beta programs
which often covers skinning programs in the works. |
|
|
Neoplanet, the skinnable web
browser’s home page. |
|
|
Website for Sonique.com another
popular mp3 player. |
Glossary of Skinning terms…
Skin
|
A pre-packaged set of graphics that includes all the
pieces necessary to change the look and feel of a particular interface.
Graphics could include bitmaps for buttons, title bars, sliders, radio
buttons, check boxes, and borders. A skin is expected to alter the size,
shape and position of the item it is skinning. |
|
Skinning |
The act of applying a skin. |
|
Rip |
A skin that contains graphics or style taken from another
skin author’s. Highly frowned upon. |
|
Theme |
A pre-packaged set of graphics that replaces directly the
graphics of an existing item but does not alter its size or shape or
position. A packaged set of icons is
called a “theme” because it is just replacing the icons. One exception to this rule is Litestep
which doesn’t fit under either skin or theme but has its installable
interfaces named “themes”. |
|
Cloner |
A developer who merely tries to copy an existing skinning
or skinnable program that is not advancing the technology. For example,
Sonique is not a clone of Winamp because it takes skinning technology
further. But a program that basically does the same thing as Winamp and
nothing more is a clone and its developer labeled a “cloner”. |
|
Deadware |
A skinning program that has been started and later
abandoned by its author. Such software is often made “open source” but is
still not worked on. The skinning
community has a very high percentage of programs that are called deadware
because writing a skinnable or skinning program seems fun to do but it actually
extremely difficult and tedious at times. Thus many projects get started and
are subsequently abandoned. |
|
Photoskinz |
The act of taking commercial artwork and turning it into a
skin. It is generally frowned on and legally iffy. For instance, creating an ICQplus skin with pictures of Mickey
mouse taken from Disney’s home page would be a prime example. |