19 ms·

Wow, it even has skin support! I spent way too many hours developing skins for WinAmp and Trillian back in the late 90s as a teenager. I get why skins fell out

by _diyu 9y ago

Wow, it even has skin support! I spent way too many hours developing skins for WinAmp and Trillian back in the late 90s as a teenager. I get why skins fell out of style, but I also kinda wish they didn't. Choosing a skin lets you personalize an app, creating a skin does so even more while also letting you express your creativity, and having skins creates a community. If I ever make an app where skinning would make sense, I would 100% go for it. Skinning should make a come-back.

mfkp 9y ago
I've noticed lots of chat apps are adding skins/themes lately. Telegram is a great example, I believe slack also has basic theme support.
weavie 9y ago
Absolutely. I don't get why skins fell out of style. I remember back in the day when I was working on an accounting app, even that I made skinnable. You may just be reconciling your bank account, but at least you could do it in a form that looked like it was made from marble, or wood, or whatever you wanted! It just made everything feel just a little bit less tedious... at least to me
- _sdegutis 9y ago
  At least when Trillian ditched skins, I think they were trying to compete with the bigger players (MSN, Google Chat) more seriously in the business world, and skinning isn't really something businesses care much about. In fact, just having this feature available can make the app seem more juvenile and less appealing than more "serious" alternatives. Plus, you have to keep adding skin support for every new feature you add, which means the many skins that don't keep up will no longer work for the latest version of your app, which pisses off users. And when skins slow down or stop being made (people get bored, move on) it reflects poorly on the app, making it look like a ghost town.
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
    > At least when Trillian ditched skins, I think they were trying to compete with the bigger players (MSN, Google Chat) more seriously in the business world, and skinning isn't really something businesses care much about. Businesses often care a lot about it, they just call it “branding” (and it can be a big deal, even for internal tools); obviously, you need to show different examples to them than typical consumers.
- egypturnash 9y ago
  Apple's designers decided that looked tacky and stopped doing it; the rest of the industry soon followed suit. Now everything has to be floating in a screamingly bright white void, so that your phone ruins your night vision every time you pull it out. (I may have opinions about this trend.)
greymeister 9y ago
I always used skins in Winamp/XMMS, but I'm immediately filled with nostalgia upon seeing the default skin. I wonder if people who came to use computers in the last decade will experience the sort of enjoyment I got out of customizing the look and feel of applications. All of the walled gardens have intertwined design with functionality to the point where skinning doesn't really exist in the same way. I haven't used Windows 10, but I wonder if it's possible to replace the Windows shell like I used to in college.
- mi100hael 9y ago
  Honestly, skinning is probably easier today than it ever has been. With custom client-side stylesheets, there's no reason someone couldn't roll out custom skins for sites like Facebook, Twitter, etc.
  - _sdegutis 9y ago
    I bet there's branding and usability reasons for Facebook to avoid allowing you to skin/theme it to the extent Winamp was skinnable. Not sure I know what those are, but I just really doubt they'll ever add that feature.
    - pionar 9y ago
      Probably more like value reasons. What's the point? Would that drive more users to Facebook? Or current users to spend more time there?
    - jsgo 9y ago
      While it worked great for Winamp and a few other apps, the process was a negative for others: MySpace being a big example. People modifying their pages to look like Angelfire/Geocities sites from back in the day killed any interest I had in them.
      - greymeister 9y ago
        Tumblr took the other path in allowing you to customize your own user experience, it certainly comes with a trade-off.
VMG 9y ago
browsers still have it
- _sdegutis 9y ago
  Not to the same degree.
PascLeRasc 9y ago
We've still got Slack themes: http://slackthemes.net/ http://slackthemes.net/. Almost a necessity when you have multiple channels.
- therealdrag0 9y ago
  Drives me nuts that the sidebar is the only them-able part. The white background in the chat window destroys my eyes.
  - joobus 9y ago
    On the web, install stylish and use https://userstyles.org/styles/117475/slack-night-mode-black https://userstyles.org/styles/117475/slack-night-mode-black
    - therealdrag0 9y ago
      Now I feel dumb. I use Dark Reader [0] for all my web browsing. I was just so used to the desktop Slack client I forgot about the web one. Thanks for reminding me. [0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dark-reader/eimadpbcbfnmbkopoojfekhnkhdbieeh https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dark-reader/eimadp...
make3 9y ago
sorry to be the party pooper, but saddly, allowing skins kind of forfeits your control over the ui & design of your app doesn't it
- khedoros1 9y ago
  The dev still has the power to choose the default; the user just has the ability to veto it. That sounds like a massive positive, from the user's perspective.
- jlarocco 9y ago
  So? An app isn't meant to hang in a museum and look pretty for the developer. If the end user thinks it would be better with a different font or larger text or a different background, then they're right. And realistically once an app ships to the end user the developer has forfeited all control anyway.
  - digi_owl 9y ago
    > So? An app isn't meant to hang in a museum and look pretty for the developer. Oh how many devs i have encountered over the years with that exact attitude, in particular post iPhone...
taytus 9y ago
I wonder why we are not skinning websites 🧐
- digi_owl 9y ago
  Could have sworn that browsers have the capability to load custom CSS. But then writing CSS may well be a full time job, so...
  - ripdog 9y ago
    CSS is pretty simple. Lots of people offer custom stylesheets for websites at https://userstyles.org https://userstyles.org.
    - sovok_x 9y ago
      CSS is pretty simple but modern sites have hundreds to thousands selectors. If you want to do anything worthwhile you need to modify big part of those. And hope new updates won't change anything making your custom layout a total mess at some random point. I tried to theme some popular sites to my taste of dark themes and it's really tedious.
      - ripdog 9y ago
        Obviously every site is different, but I've developed a few styles before for sites like DDG and wikipedia, and it's a job measured in hours, generally. Nowhere near the amount of work involved in most OSS, and plenty of people here work on OSS.
- jonahx 9y ago
  https://userstyles.org https://userstyles.org
- nirv 9y ago
  Coincidentally, I just recently signed a tiny private Firefox extension to improve the readability of the HN comments to my taste :-).
digi_owl 9y ago
Used to be a thing on Linux DEs, but then one of the major interface libs kept screwing around with their themeing APIs...
- bluedino 9y ago
  Unity tweak tool lets you do it in ubuntu
pilsetnieks 9y ago
It came as a surprise to me but I found out literally today that VLC is skinnable: https://www.videolan.org/vlc/skins.html https://www.videolan.org/vlc/skins.html If you don't want/can't run Winamp, VLC might almost be what you want.
- louhike 9y ago
  Foobar2000 is a nice and customizable/skinnable audio player also.
  - nemof 9y ago
    i've been using fb2k for more than a decade now, but i gave up trying to do anything to fancy with it because its addon support was such a clusterfsck, mostly because i found over time that a lot of addons became defunct as their developer vanished, or the links broke or etc, and trying to get support on hydrogen audio was like sticking your hands into a bees nest. to be fair it's been a long time since i looked into skinning it and things may be better now. it's still an excellent clean audio player, i just keep it close to stock with a few addons so i send audio to a chromecast. there sure were some wild and beautiful fb2k skins and themes back in the day.
egypturnash 9y ago
Even better: skins that let you relocate everything. It was super-awesome to have a little cartoon cat sitting on a spaceship on my desktop, and poke at various parts of it to control Audion. (http://egypt.urnash.com/portfolio/contragravity/ http://egypt.urnash.com/portfolio/contragravity/)
kinkrtyavimoodh 9y ago
The closest thing we have to skinning on a major mainstream website today is subreddits being allowed to customize their CSS, and looking at what utter disasters the vast majority of subreddits look in their custom skins, I am somehow not super stoked about the idea.
ashleyn 9y ago
From the standpoint of a designer, skinning deprives a product of a unique identity.
- _sdegutis 9y ago
  But if you're the only app with skinning support, it's a different sort of identity, and arguably a stronger one. I forgot almost all of the MP3 players I used in the 90s and 2000s, but Winamp is the one I do remember by name, probably for this reason.
tracker1 9y ago
I spent a lot of time customizing Windows skinning back in the late 90's and early 2000's. Unfortunately that kind of fell out of style as well. Third party ui shell replacements and easy customization are things I miss. I know you can supposedly do this with Gnome etc, but I really haven't taken the time/effort to do so, as I just don't have it these days. I will say I really like(d) the windows 7-10 taskbar in general, and the windows 7-style start menu interaction with the windows 10 look (without the tiles). I switched to Ubuntu with gnome last year after win10 just pissed me off one too many times with the "user engagement" crap that gets loaded with win10. Though I've thought about going back a few times. (Laptop at home and at work are 2014-2015 mac pros)
ice3 9y ago
It even supports the old Winamp easter egg! Type nullsoft

by _diyu 9y ago

mfkp 9y ago

I've noticed lots of chat apps are adding skins/themes lately. Telegram is a great example, I believe slack also has basic theme support.

weavie 9y ago

Absolutely. I don't get why skins fell out of style. I remember back in the day when I was working on an accounting app, even that I made skinnable. You may just be reconciling your bank account, but at least you could do it in a form that looked like it was made from marble, or wood, or whatever you wanted! It just made everything feel just a little bit less tedious... at least to me

_sdegutis 9y ago
At least when Trillian ditched skins, I think they were trying to compete with the bigger players (MSN, Google Chat) more seriously in the business world, and skinning isn't really something businesses care much about. In fact, just having this feature available can make the app seem more juvenile and less appealing than more "serious" alternatives. Plus, you have to keep adding skin support for every new feature you add, which means the many skins that don't keep up will no longer work for the latest version of your app, which pisses off users. And when skins slow down or stop being made (people get bored, move on) it reflects poorly on the app, making it look like a ghost town.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > At least when Trillian ditched skins, I think they were trying to compete with the bigger players (MSN, Google Chat) more seriously in the business world, and skinning isn't really something businesses care much about. Businesses often care a lot about it, they just call it “branding” (and it can be a big deal, even for internal tools); obviously, you need to show different examples to them than typical consumers.
egypturnash 9y ago
Apple's designers decided that looked tacky and stopped doing it; the rest of the industry soon followed suit. Now everything has to be floating in a screamingly bright white void, so that your phone ruins your night vision every time you pull it out. (I may have opinions about this trend.)

greymeister 9y ago

I always used skins in Winamp/XMMS, but I'm immediately filled with nostalgia upon seeing the default skin. I wonder if people who came to use computers in the last decade will experience the sort of enjoyment I got out of customizing the look and feel of applications. All of the walled gardens have intertwined design with functionality to the point where skinning doesn't really exist in the same way. I haven't used Windows 10, but I wonder if it's possible to replace the Windows shell like I used to in college.

mi100hael 9y ago
Honestly, skinning is probably easier today than it ever has been. With custom client-side stylesheets, there's no reason someone couldn't roll out custom skins for sites like Facebook, Twitter, etc.
- _sdegutis 9y ago
  I bet there's branding and usability reasons for Facebook to avoid allowing you to skin/theme it to the extent Winamp was skinnable. Not sure I know what those are, but I just really doubt they'll ever add that feature.
  - pionar 9y ago
    Probably more like value reasons. What's the point? Would that drive more users to Facebook? Or current users to spend more time there?
  - jsgo 9y ago
    While it worked great for Winamp and a few other apps, the process was a negative for others: MySpace being a big example. People modifying their pages to look like Angelfire/Geocities sites from back in the day killed any interest I had in them.
    - greymeister 9y ago
      Tumblr took the other path in allowing you to customize your own user experience, it certainly comes with a trade-off.

VMG 9y ago

browsers still have it

_sdegutis 9y ago
Not to the same degree.

PascLeRasc 9y ago

We've still got Slack themes: http://slackthemes.net/ http://slackthemes.net/. Almost a necessity when you have multiple channels.

therealdrag0 9y ago
Drives me nuts that the sidebar is the only them-able part. The white background in the chat window destroys my eyes.
- joobus 9y ago
  On the web, install stylish and use https://userstyles.org/styles/117475/slack-night-mode-black https://userstyles.org/styles/117475/slack-night-mode-black
  - therealdrag0 9y ago
    Now I feel dumb. I use Dark Reader [0] for all my web browsing. I was just so used to the desktop Slack client I forgot about the web one. Thanks for reminding me. [0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dark-reader/eimadpbcbfnmbkopoojfekhnkhdbieeh https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dark-reader/eimadp...

make3 9y ago

sorry to be the party pooper, but saddly, allowing skins kind of forfeits your control over the ui & design of your app doesn't it

khedoros1 9y ago
The dev still has the power to choose the default; the user just has the ability to veto it. That sounds like a massive positive, from the user's perspective.
jlarocco 9y ago
So? An app isn't meant to hang in a museum and look pretty for the developer. If the end user thinks it would be better with a different font or larger text or a different background, then they're right. And realistically once an app ships to the end user the developer has forfeited all control anyway.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  > So? An app isn't meant to hang in a museum and look pretty for the developer. Oh how many devs i have encountered over the years with that exact attitude, in particular post iPhone...

taytus 9y ago

I wonder why we are not skinning websites 🧐

digi_owl 9y ago
Could have sworn that browsers have the capability to load custom CSS. But then writing CSS may well be a full time job, so...
- ripdog 9y ago
  CSS is pretty simple. Lots of people offer custom stylesheets for websites at https://userstyles.org https://userstyles.org.
  - sovok_x 9y ago
    CSS is pretty simple but modern sites have hundreds to thousands selectors. If you want to do anything worthwhile you need to modify big part of those. And hope new updates won't change anything making your custom layout a total mess at some random point. I tried to theme some popular sites to my taste of dark themes and it's really tedious.
    - ripdog 9y ago
      Obviously every site is different, but I've developed a few styles before for sites like DDG and wikipedia, and it's a job measured in hours, generally. Nowhere near the amount of work involved in most OSS, and plenty of people here work on OSS.
jonahx 9y ago
https://userstyles.org https://userstyles.org
nirv 9y ago
Coincidentally, I just recently signed a tiny private Firefox extension to improve the readability of the HN comments to my taste :-).

digi_owl 9y ago

Used to be a thing on Linux DEs, but then one of the major interface libs kept screwing around with their themeing APIs...

bluedino 9y ago
Unity tweak tool lets you do it in ubuntu

pilsetnieks 9y ago

It came as a surprise to me but I found out literally today that VLC is skinnable: https://www.videolan.org/vlc/skins.html https://www.videolan.org/vlc/skins.html If you don't want/can't run Winamp, VLC might almost be what you want.

louhike 9y ago
Foobar2000 is a nice and customizable/skinnable audio player also.
- nemof 9y ago
  i've been using fb2k for more than a decade now, but i gave up trying to do anything to fancy with it because its addon support was such a clusterfsck, mostly because i found over time that a lot of addons became defunct as their developer vanished, or the links broke or etc, and trying to get support on hydrogen audio was like sticking your hands into a bees nest. to be fair it's been a long time since i looked into skinning it and things may be better now. it's still an excellent clean audio player, i just keep it close to stock with a few addons so i send audio to a chromecast. there sure were some wild and beautiful fb2k skins and themes back in the day.

egypturnash 9y ago

Even better: skins that let you relocate everything. It was super-awesome to have a little cartoon cat sitting on a spaceship on my desktop, and poke at various parts of it to control Audion. (http://egypt.urnash.com/portfolio/contragravity/ http://egypt.urnash.com/portfolio/contragravity/)

kinkrtyavimoodh 9y ago

The closest thing we have to skinning on a major mainstream website today is subreddits being allowed to customize their CSS, and looking at what utter disasters the vast majority of subreddits look in their custom skins, I am somehow not super stoked about the idea.

ashleyn 9y ago

From the standpoint of a designer, skinning deprives a product of a unique identity.

_sdegutis 9y ago
But if you're the only app with skinning support, it's a different sort of identity, and arguably a stronger one. I forgot almost all of the MP3 players I used in the 90s and 2000s, but Winamp is the one I do remember by name, probably for this reason.

tracker1 9y ago

I spent a lot of time customizing Windows skinning back in the late 90's and early 2000's. Unfortunately that kind of fell out of style as well. Third party ui shell replacements and easy customization are things I miss. I know you can supposedly do this with Gnome etc, but I really haven't taken the time/effort to do so, as I just don't have it these days. I will say I really like(d) the windows 7-10 taskbar in general, and the windows 7-style start menu interaction with the windows 10 look (without the tiles). I switched to Ubuntu with gnome last year after win10 just pissed me off one too many times with the "user engagement" crap that gets loaded with win10. Though I've thought about going back a few times. (Laptop at home and at work are 2014-2015 mac pros)

ice3 9y ago

It even supports the old Winamp easter egg! Type nullsoft