The decade is just about over. 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.

Let’s take a look at some of the highs and lows of skinning for the past decade.

The rise of WindowBlinds

No discussion of skinning would be complete without WindowBlinds.

WindowBlinds demonstrated both the marvels of skinning and its occasional depravity by letting users completely change the look and feel of the Windows GUI.  The success of WindowBlinds sparked a cottage industry of skinning programs but none (so far) have rivaled WindowBlinds in terms of sheer popularity.

Some highlights

Driftwood by Dangeruss

Frogboy by Alexandrie

Capsula by Allen Bond

As 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.

The Uxtheme patchers

As much as I’d like to pretend otherwise, GUI skinning can’t be discussed without talking about uxtheme patching.  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.  Unfortunately, the method WindowBlinds used was done because developer Stardock didn’t have access to the Windows source code. 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.  Where WindowBlinds used wblind.dll Microsoft went with uxtheme.dll. Where WindowBlinds skins had .UIS files, Microsoft called theirs .msstyles.

Unexpectedly, having created an engine that could do skinning, Microsoft never went beyond the Luna skin and locked the file format.  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.  Many flame wars ensued over whether it was a good idea to patch system files.

What can be said is that msstyle skinners helped enrich the skinning community with some great designs.  Without uxtheme and msstyles, I think it’s safe to say that skinning would never have gotten as popular as it did.

Litestep

No list would be complete without talking about Litestep, the shell that let users replace Explorer.  Back in 2000, Litestep had a significant following. The Windows shell was, for the time, bloated, slow, and feature poor. Litestep helped solve this.  Its popularity has declined as Windows explorer improved and system memory has increased but it remains in active development to this date.

Litestep

Other players

Hoverdesk became popular for a time but ceased development in 2003.

WinStep isn’t a replacement shell as much as it is a way to extend Explorer. This strategy has led to its continued popularity to this day.

Winamp

You can’t seriously do one of these skinning lists without mentioning Winamp.

Winamp

Winamp is a media player that became very popular in the late 90s and helped popularize the term “skinning” in the first place.  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”.  In 2007, Winamp 5.5 was released which helped make it feature competitive with other players.

Default Winamp 5.5 skin

The Gadget Wars

Widgets, Gadgets, Objects = cool technologies looking for a practical use.  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).  3 years later, the second program of the new genre arrived – Konfabulator.

DesktopX

Konfabulator

DesktopX was more powerful – it supported C++ plugins and could build desktops and create (with the Pro version) stand-alone programs. But Konfabulator kicked DesktopX’s butt in terms of popularity.  Developer Stardock came from an engineering background – tech tech tech.  The Konfabulator team, by contrast, came from a design background and made sure Konfabulator came with prettier and more interesting default content.

Apple then came along and ripped off the concept (yes Apple fans, I said ripped off) and stuffed widgets into the OS.  Microsoft, copying Apple, then put “gadgets” into Windows later on.

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, having copied the gadget concept from Apple without knowing why largely abandoned them in Windows 7.  DesktopX has remained in statis for the past couple of years with version 4 only recently having gone into beta.

The problem with objects,widgets, and gadgets is that there’s only a handful of things that make sense as gadgets.  Hence, over 34 trillion weather widgets and calendar gadgets were made.

And beyond

Of course, I’m only scratching the surface here.  The comments section will hopefully let others express other programs and movements that this brief article didn’t get into.  Skinning got very popular at the start of the decade and as that decade comes to an end moves into a state of transition as the OS’s become more powerful and the graphics hardware more capable. 

It will be an exciting journey to see where skinning goes next.