Early 2000s. Every myspace looks different. AIM profiles with colors, poems, quotes, and links. WinAmp skins, but also skins in desktops (WindowBlinds), wallpapers (DeviantArt), icons, ringtones, etc. To be cool, you'd make it yours. It all had a sort of gaudy messiness that never appealed to the artists and proto-hipsters, but they were the odd ones. And you could clearly tell what was business vs personal. Business was square and beige. Personal was colorful and round. It's all mixed together now. The moment when this flipped for me was the iPhone, because unlike Blackberry or Sidekick, this was a device that was meant for <i>both</i> work and play, and it pushed the design boundaries equally together. Facebook, Bootstrap, the death of RSS, the rise of streaming music services, etc. all happened around the same time. It felt fresh and modern! I remember. And it wasn't just surface-level design - the real change was in our personalities. Bring your whole self to work. Craft your personal brand. 10 more life hacks. Delete those facebook photos and that old blog. In 2020, hey now I even see your kitchen and your kids! There became no place to retreat to. Epitomized in any modern Apple ad. It elevated us, so we accepted it, but now deviate too far and mobs will attack you. Our age is an age of conformity. I'm reminded of a documentary called Helvetica from 2007. Has the world become less personalized? Even the word personalized doesn't quite capture what I wonder that was lost, because <i>personalized</i> would not be a word I'd have used then. What could cause this trend to reverse?
This fills me with such bittersweet nostalgia and, I dare say it, homesickness. The internet is such a different place than it used to, even our computers don't feel the same. I'm brought back to countless dark nights spent awake, roaming IRC and learning as much as I could about all the topics available online with such intensity you would think I was afraid it would suddenly blink out of existence. In a way, it did.
Good memories. Also spent some time scrolling through <a href="https://skins.webamp.org/" rel="nofollow">https://skins.webamp.org/</a> and found some I'd never seen before that I liked!
Cambrian explosion of user interface creativity during that era.<p>Also worth watching: WinAmp Skinparty by Silvio Lorusso & Adriano Vulpio <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJTUiO6f1-8" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJTUiO6f1-8</a>
I used to spend 30 minutes a day on a 56kbps connection downloading a new one. I think I made a resident evil 3 skin too.<p>Honestly I've yet to see a skin that looks better than the default winamp 2 skin. There are a few that come close, buy not a single one that beats it out.
Here's a more visual website with built-in search: <a href="https://skins.webamp.org/" rel="nofollow">https://skins.webamp.org/</a>
One of the best media players back in the day. I believe even to this date it still is, offering a level of customisation and playability unparalleled by modern players.
Milkdrop is still alive! Here is an epic collection of the best presets.<p><a href="https://thefulldomeblog.com/2020/02/21/nestdrop-presets-collection-cream-of-the-crop/" rel="nofollow">https://thefulldomeblog.com/2020/02/21/nestdrop-presets-coll...</a>
This is a blast from the past. I remember using at least two of those skins. Winamp had easy to use advanced features. I remember choosing it over the windows player. I eventually picked up a Gigabeat and needed to use both players.<p>I still don’t know if I would go back to self managed music collections. There is an impulse to do it but I enjoy the near instant satisfaction from Apple Music. The desktop Apple music player however is lacking features and speediness.
Memories! Back in school days in early 2000s I was a basketball fan and also of course running Winamp 24/7. I was never good at drawing but got curious and started making skins themed with basketball clubs' colors and logos. First few were rather horrible, but I think the last ones I did are not that bad (even if pretty simple); they got quite a few downloads back in the day and I was really hyped!<p><a href="https://archive.org/details/winampskin_Idea_Slask_Wroclaw_Amp" rel="nofollow">https://archive.org/details/winampskin_Idea_Slask_Wroclaw_Am...</a><p><a href="https://archive.org/details/winampskin_Lotos_VBW_Clima_Gdynia_Amp" rel="nofollow">https://archive.org/details/winampskin_Lotos_VBW_Clima_Gdyni...</a><p>(Unfortunately they turned out not very future-proof; I used sponsor-based names and logos and sponsors are long gone; also the once top-European clubs are now barely functioning. Life.)
Cool! I found the skin I made way back when, <a href="https://archive.org/details/winampskin_SpyAMP_Professional_Edition_v5" rel="nofollow">https://archive.org/details/winampskin_SpyAMP_Professional_E...</a>
cool, the skin I made in high school made it in the archive
good memories
<a href="https://archive.org/details/winampskin_Apogee" rel="nofollow">https://archive.org/details/winampskin_Apogee</a>
I find it sad skins for modern widget toolkits and desktop environments are much less numerous and seemingly much harder to make. It was so simple and cool with WinAmp. Why can't we do it this way today?
Always worth a follow on twitter for a daily dose of these <a href="https://twitter.com/winampskins" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/winampskins</a>
Why is this so heart warming to see, even though I wasn't a Winamp user. Skinnable software needs revival, we should let users have all the fun they can have.
Does anyone know what kind of UI library Winamp uses? I mean, if it's opensource, we can probably use it to build a lot more fun UIs since it's so "skinable".
My favourite WinAmp skin is still Drone. I still use it on my windows box today. It has a great docked mode. WinAmp doesn't work as well on high-dpi screens though, sadly. It's still a solid media player though.