The thing about back then that was so amazing is the amount of personalization you had with your desktop environment. Windows 95/98 had different skins/themes you could use. Winamp and many other apps allowed skins. You used to be able to make your computing experience your own. We've lost that and really need to get it back. There's the ability to do this with Linux DE's of course, but that's not enough.
On the Mac side of the fence, Kaleidoscope schemes were even more capable in terms of deep desktop theming, giving the artist full control of just about everything (window chrome, controls, icons, fonts, desktop pattern/picture). Even better, they didn’t require any installation step: double-clicking a scheme file was all that was needed to radically transform your desktop. Nothing matches its capability and ease of use even today.
Artists did some wild stuff with it. A few fun examples:
One of the great things about Winamp 2 skins in particular is how simple the format is - basically just a bunch of BMPs in a zip file. Pretty much anyone could make one. You didn't need any special software or code knowledge to inspect an existing skin and see how the pieces fit together. You could make one in MSPaint if that's all you had, as I did for my first couple skins.
(There were also a few INI-style config files, mainly to define colors of dynamic things like text. For most skins you would just need to copy the defaults and maybe change a few color hex codes.)
Author of the Museum here. Agreed! That was true for "classic" Winamp skins which are what is shown here. I also took a stab at "modern" Winamp skins which were fully dynamic and scriptable and wasn't quite able to bring that to the browser. I did a writeup of that work here: https://jordaneldredge.com/webamp-modern/
Yes, except it was much more colorful and vibrant. We had pixel art instead of the the deliberately-monochromatic committee-directed stick-figure horrors of today.
This was also true on the comms apps sides. Back in the days of ICQ & Jabber, there was a huge ecosystem of chat apps, many of which (like my favorite, Miranda IM -- which has been revived for Windows as Miranda NG: https://miranda-ng.org/about/) were also fully customizable.
I remember how "true" guys did their own Miranda from scratch (which as I remember even ICQ or Jabber was needed to be installed manually as plugins). But most of us (me also) used ready builds, which was also awesome
It was really wild, out of the box you would get: sound themes, color themes, icon themes, startup sounds, wallpaper themes, different loading animations, am I forgetting something? :-D
Custom css email themes aka "stationary", which other people can see on emails from you. These are still a very prominent part of email but I don't see anyone expressing their individuality with it anymore. It feels like a huge blast from the past to get one with any kind of theme that doesn't look like something a bank would use.
There was also "smileys" but I never used those because smileys were considered tacky. Yet it's the thing that stuck harder than anything else.
I wrote a blog on this focusing on the frutiger aero style and how/why we moved from making the desktop look like a real/character-filled space to the whole "best ui is no ui" and flat design thinking. Fortunately, it seems like style is coming back in... style.
Even Linux DEs have it less now than they used to, but there are renewed efforts to bring a better universal theming engine to KDE at least.
It's more difficult now than it was back then for KDE I guess, because with Qt Widgets, QML, and Plasma you basically have three times as much to support in a theme/theming engine. And then back in the day better KDE themes also provided themes for Gtk, so that Gtk apps integrated nicely. How many concurrent Gtk versions are now used that you would all have to support? And sometimes (especially non-Qt programs) take some colors from the theme, but not others, breaking everything when you want to customize your theme (you get e.g. black text on black background). So I appreciate the renewed effort, but I'm not holding my breath.
I think its commonly cited how we "used to have so much customization" and now we dont, and i see that more as an issue with motivation over missing proper functionality. Android phones and iphones to an extent are extremely customizable in almost every facet of how you use the phone, and yet outside of social influencers selling an aesthetic no one really cares to take the time to customize. Even when entire theming libraries are available to swap fonts icons colors window styles etc at a tap, even navigating and selecting a pre-made is out of the minds of most people. Despite the availability, there will still be calls to "how phones used to have personality and style" and refer to old hello kitty flip phone designs, despite being able to accomplish everything it does on a modern device without needing to buy a specific piece of hardware to achieve it.
Why? Because I dont think most people ever actually cared about it. It became a "cool thing" to customize your MySpace or winamp, not something actually motivated by individual user behavior. The people calling for more customization options ignore the plethora of options available because what theyre wanting is a cultural shift, but everyone's attention is so divided that it feels like a waste of time to devote to something that doesnt bother you. You "miss" what you had despite never doing any work to understand it.
One thing I loved about WinAmp was its ability to use audio plugins that were if not full VST (a Steinberg-originated format), a very close VST subset. So I could use the same plugins I would in my Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) for music production to apply custom EQs beyond the built-in graphic EQ, compression/limiting, and lowpass/highpass filtering.
I had a job where I was stuck at a desk 4-6 hours a day and this let me have the best possible sound out of cheapo soundcard and speakers. This made a significant improvement to my work experience and state of mind. Allowing standard plugins to snap-in is a brilliant move, and lets those who have the time/need to do so without the app developer having to spend their energy creating native custom EQ, compressors, etc. This philosophy has carried over to REAPER (Winamp dev Justin Frankel's DAW).
What I'm missing is the leisure, energy and attention span I had in my teens to care about customizing a program as an end in itself. Back then, Winamp was something you just spent a lot of time with anyway, hearing your newest mp3s and playing with plugins, showing off your cool stuff to your buddies... it was a thing.
Maybe it's me, but I've kinda lost the desire to personalize my OS/apps. It's probably because I'm older and lazier now, and I have other things to do now. But also, I feel like it's not as fun to tinker with this stuff anymore. Everything is so connected now, I feel like all my OS/apps are watching me - like, if I added a Buffy bitmap to the background, I'm gonna get some sort of notification: "Buffy the Vampire Slayer is owned by The Walt Disney Company. You are violating the terms of service of your app. Blah blah blah." I'm probably just old and paranoid, but honestly, it just doesn't feel the same these days.
I have a question: It seems that all the preview PNGs and the WSZ files themselves are fetched from hxxp://webampskins.org. When I go to that website directly, I get redirected to some shady looking website pushing crypto and gambling. Can you give me some background about this?
Interesting! I've only ever actively used subdomains of webampskins.org, however during early testing I set a hard coded IPV4 IP as the A name for the root domain. Now it looks like that IP has been handed off to someone else who is hosting a spammy site.
Thanks for flagging, I removed that A name record.
The amazing foss music player audacious supports winamp skins in case anyone wants to use these on a modern cross platform program that's actually foss
Big thing that allowed this degree of personalization and skinning was that everyone was running fairly homogenous display equipment. When you don't need to deal with a whole spectrum of aspect ratios, input affordances, and DPIs, skinning and customization is something you can do in any image editing software.
It could still be relatively simple if the industry could agree on a few standard DPIs for screens. While still a substantial amount of extra work, raster images with clean 1x, 2x, and maybe 3x variants are a lot more flexible and easier to produce something good looking with than trying to fight vector formats that will end up looking “fuzzy” 70% of the time due to lines landing on half-pixels and such.
Can't really put the toothpaste back in the tube on that one. Too many monitors that are like 30-40% off any clean integer scaling in the wild for that to be viable now.
Probably true, but I think if I were writing a theming system I’d still key it off of clean multiples and have fractional screens as second tier targets. Fractional screens are going to look somewhat compromised no matter what, so may as well let themes be their best if the user happens to have an integer scaling screen.
I'll have to spend some time trying to find it if it's on there, but I had one at one point called "Pimeer" where the text was rendered in such a way to look like a Pioneer stereo. Fooled me at the time.
I always though the skin model would be a great UX paradigm for an OS to follow. Pity we have gone the opposite direction and it is turtlenecks and "user delight" all the way down.
If someone is looking for an insane project, please make Winamp player as a tactile real world physical device, with all the same features. Maybe with a little E-ink display too.
The thing about back then that was so amazing is the amount of personalization you had with your desktop environment. Windows 95/98 had different skins/themes you could use. Winamp and many other apps allowed skins. You used to be able to make your computing experience your own. We've lost that and really need to get it back. There's the ability to do this with Linux DE's of course, but that's not enough.
On the Mac side of the fence, Kaleidoscope schemes were even more capable in terms of deep desktop theming, giving the artist full control of just about everything (window chrome, controls, icons, fonts, desktop pattern/picture). Even better, they didn’t require any installation step: double-clicking a scheme file was all that was needed to radically transform your desktop. Nothing matches its capability and ease of use even today.
Artists did some wild stuff with it. A few fun examples:
https://macthemes.garden/themes/c7005c70d044-Wrecked-Angles/
https://macthemes.garden/themes/2852d54a73a3-Windows-98/
https://macthemes.garden/themes/0219829f8a23-HolySmoke/
https://macthemes.garden/themes/8405ec7f05e4-MacPlaza/
https://macthemes.garden/themes/92b39d18db52-MammaMia/
https://macthemes.garden/themes/9a95c2efce50-Scanline/
https://macthemes.garden/themes/64bd1a86e9e6-Onyx/
Wow that's cool! I had no idea about these back then.
One of the great things about Winamp 2 skins in particular is how simple the format is - basically just a bunch of BMPs in a zip file. Pretty much anyone could make one. You didn't need any special software or code knowledge to inspect an existing skin and see how the pieces fit together. You could make one in MSPaint if that's all you had, as I did for my first couple skins.
(There were also a few INI-style config files, mainly to define colors of dynamic things like text. For most skins you would just need to copy the defaults and maybe change a few color hex codes.)
Author of the Museum here. Agreed! That was true for "classic" Winamp skins which are what is shown here. I also took a stab at "modern" Winamp skins which were fully dynamic and scriptable and wasn't quite able to bring that to the browser. I did a writeup of that work here: https://jordaneldredge.com/webamp-modern/
Yeah, back in the day I made myself one from screenshots of the in-game GUI of Chrono Trigger. It wasn't very good, but hey, it was mine!
I like the customization of the OS but I hate when the app developers are feeling creative and can't fit into (my OS of choice) Look&Feel :/
The thing is, back then, it worked, because every app looked completely different from each other, and so it was a clusterfuck anyway :-D
Hmm… my memory may not be the best but apart from WinAmp almost every other app kinda stuck to the OS? ;o
So, same thing as today then?
Yes, except it was much more colorful and vibrant. We had pixel art instead of the the deliberately-monochromatic committee-directed stick-figure horrors of today.
Correct, nowadays it's accidental and boring inconsistencies, because they're all trying to be more minimal than the other app.
This was also true on the comms apps sides. Back in the days of ICQ & Jabber, there was a huge ecosystem of chat apps, many of which (like my favorite, Miranda IM -- which has been revived for Windows as Miranda NG: https://miranda-ng.org/about/) were also fully customizable.
I remember how "true" guys did their own Miranda from scratch (which as I remember even ICQ or Jabber was needed to be installed manually as plugins). But most of us (me also) used ready builds, which was also awesome
It was really wild, out of the box you would get: sound themes, color themes, icon themes, startup sounds, wallpaper themes, different loading animations, am I forgetting something? :-D
Custom css email themes aka "stationary", which other people can see on emails from you. These are still a very prominent part of email but I don't see anyone expressing their individuality with it anymore. It feels like a huge blast from the past to get one with any kind of theme that doesn't look like something a bank would use.
There was also "smileys" but I never used those because smileys were considered tacky. Yet it's the thing that stuck harder than anything else.
Custom, sometimes animated, mouse pointers!
I remember them for rendering my computer almost unusable by eating up nearly all of the available compute... But my gosh it was pretty!
As part of building Webamp I did a side quest to enable rendering Windows animated cursor on the web. You can read about it here: https://jordaneldredge.com/rendering-animated-ani-cursors-in...
I wrote a blog on this focusing on the frutiger aero style and how/why we moved from making the desktop look like a real/character-filled space to the whole "best ui is no ui" and flat design thinking. Fortunately, it seems like style is coming back in... style.
The blog post: https://decodingvibes.com/blog/genz-and-frutiger-aero/
Omarchy seems to be doing a really good job with just that. But like you said, Linux.
Even Linux DEs have it less now than they used to, but there are renewed efforts to bring a better universal theming engine to KDE at least.
It's more difficult now than it was back then for KDE I guess, because with Qt Widgets, QML, and Plasma you basically have three times as much to support in a theme/theming engine. And then back in the day better KDE themes also provided themes for Gtk, so that Gtk apps integrated nicely. How many concurrent Gtk versions are now used that you would all have to support? And sometimes (especially non-Qt programs) take some colors from the theme, but not others, breaking everything when you want to customize your theme (you get e.g. black text on black background). So I appreciate the renewed effort, but I'm not holding my breath.
I think its commonly cited how we "used to have so much customization" and now we dont, and i see that more as an issue with motivation over missing proper functionality. Android phones and iphones to an extent are extremely customizable in almost every facet of how you use the phone, and yet outside of social influencers selling an aesthetic no one really cares to take the time to customize. Even when entire theming libraries are available to swap fonts icons colors window styles etc at a tap, even navigating and selecting a pre-made is out of the minds of most people. Despite the availability, there will still be calls to "how phones used to have personality and style" and refer to old hello kitty flip phone designs, despite being able to accomplish everything it does on a modern device without needing to buy a specific piece of hardware to achieve it.
Why? Because I dont think most people ever actually cared about it. It became a "cool thing" to customize your MySpace or winamp, not something actually motivated by individual user behavior. The people calling for more customization options ignore the plethora of options available because what theyre wanting is a cultural shift, but everyone's attention is so divided that it feels like a waste of time to devote to something that doesnt bother you. You "miss" what you had despite never doing any work to understand it.
One thing I loved about WinAmp was its ability to use audio plugins that were if not full VST (a Steinberg-originated format), a very close VST subset. So I could use the same plugins I would in my Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) for music production to apply custom EQs beyond the built-in graphic EQ, compression/limiting, and lowpass/highpass filtering.
I had a job where I was stuck at a desk 4-6 hours a day and this let me have the best possible sound out of cheapo soundcard and speakers. This made a significant improvement to my work experience and state of mind. Allowing standard plugins to snap-in is a brilliant move, and lets those who have the time/need to do so without the app developer having to spend their energy creating native custom EQ, compressors, etc. This philosophy has carried over to REAPER (Winamp dev Justin Frankel's DAW).
What I'm missing is the leisure, energy and attention span I had in my teens to care about customizing a program as an end in itself. Back then, Winamp was something you just spent a lot of time with anyway, hearing your newest mp3s and playing with plugins, showing off your cool stuff to your buddies... it was a thing.
Maybe it's me, but I've kinda lost the desire to personalize my OS/apps. It's probably because I'm older and lazier now, and I have other things to do now. But also, I feel like it's not as fun to tinker with this stuff anymore. Everything is so connected now, I feel like all my OS/apps are watching me - like, if I added a Buffy bitmap to the background, I'm gonna get some sort of notification: "Buffy the Vampire Slayer is owned by The Walt Disney Company. You are violating the terms of service of your app. Blah blah blah." I'm probably just old and paranoid, but honestly, it just doesn't feel the same these days.
The Museum is great, though! Thanks!
> You used to be able to make your computing experience your own. We've lost that and really need to get it back.
All of these Winamp skins work perfectly well in Audacious.
Go on. Do it. It's not like you were doing anything else. Get it installed.
Oh! Author of the project here, but not op. Happy to answer any questions.
The code for the Museum as well as the Webamp player that powers the interactive preview can be found here: https://github.com/captbaritone/webamp
You can also find a blog post I wrote about the project here: https://jordaneldredge.com/winamp-skin-musuem/
I have a question: It seems that all the preview PNGs and the WSZ files themselves are fetched from hxxp://webampskins.org. When I go to that website directly, I get redirected to some shady looking website pushing crypto and gambling. Can you give me some background about this?
Interesting! I've only ever actively used subdomains of webampskins.org, however during early testing I set a hard coded IPV4 IP as the A name for the root domain. Now it looks like that IP has been handed off to someone else who is hosting a spammy site.
Thanks for flagging, I removed that A name record.
No problem, glad that got sorted out :)
one of the best desktop apps ever made, should be in the software smithsonian along with winzip, netscape, a few others from that era.
The amazing foss music player audacious supports winamp skins in case anyone wants to use these on a modern cross platform program that's actually foss
OMG, you just catapulted me back to being 12 again!
Similar experience here. I almost cried a little.
Reading my skin notes thirty plus years later is a very strange experience.
Big thing that allowed this degree of personalization and skinning was that everyone was running fairly homogenous display equipment. When you don't need to deal with a whole spectrum of aspect ratios, input affordances, and DPIs, skinning and customization is something you can do in any image editing software.
It could still be relatively simple if the industry could agree on a few standard DPIs for screens. While still a substantial amount of extra work, raster images with clean 1x, 2x, and maybe 3x variants are a lot more flexible and easier to produce something good looking with than trying to fight vector formats that will end up looking “fuzzy” 70% of the time due to lines landing on half-pixels and such.
Can't really put the toothpaste back in the tube on that one. Too many monitors that are like 30-40% off any clean integer scaling in the wild for that to be viable now.
Probably true, but I think if I were writing a theming system I’d still key it off of clean multiples and have fractional screens as second tier targets. Fractional screens are going to look somewhat compromised no matter what, so may as well let themes be their best if the user happens to have an integer scaling screen.
Correct, and the same goes for webpages, they were built for 15" and/or 17".
I don't want to use it, but I would laugh if someone made Visual Studio Code look like Winamp...
I'll have to spend some time trying to find it if it's on there, but I had one at one point called "Pimeer" where the text was rendered in such a way to look like a Pioneer stereo. Fooled me at the time.
Looks like that was a "modern" Winamp skin, which are unfortunately not displayed in the museum: https://winampheritage.com/skin/pimeer-v2-2-ultime/142664
It took me a while to realize that they are fully working if you click on it.
I always though the skin model would be a great UX paradigm for an OS to follow. Pity we have gone the opposite direction and it is turtlenecks and "user delight" all the way down.
Yesterday someone put a Winamp-vibe radio player on a Waveshare ESP32-S3 1.54 LCD. Now if only these skins can be ported to that too. I’m in awe!
So many memories. We definitely lost something along the way.
The first internet memes were just winamp skins
Winamp is a blast from the past!
The Mr. Bean one is amazing
If someone is looking for an insane project, please make Winamp player as a tactile real world physical device, with all the same features. Maybe with a little E-ink display too.
This is an idea that 3D artists have been playing with for years. I've collected 63 different artists imaginings of this here: https://jordaneldredge.com/physical-winamp/
…yea, so why doesn’t someone build one?
Your reasons were what?
No skills, no resources
E-ink would be too modern, needs an analog matrix display, like https://i.imgur.com/wgnCKrh.png (but miniaturized).
Take my money!
ah, brings back memories. third one from the left was my favourite.
something something slaps llama something
"It really whips the llama's ass"
Archived soundbite: https://archive.org/details/youtube-LWKxtWEkS1c
Why can't we have nice things anymore?
Jony.