Skinning in our life
Skinning, in my humble opinion, is an essential part of modern computer art. First of all, I'd like to make an exception: those "masterpieces", made in a couple of minutes with the help of famous skinner.exe from the photo of beloved Britney, which was downloaded from hell knows where, have nothing in common both with computer art and with art in general.
The pioneer in the field of changeable interfaces was Winamp, which supported the ability to change the ordinary appearance of the program to something more original, plus plugin support, but of course the quality of sound played far from the last role in program's popularity. Justly there are clones of the program for almost any platform to the present moment and support for Winamp's skin format can be found in a great number of modern programs: from various media players to clocks, like Chameleon Clock. Whatever computer managers and specialists predict, a chain computer music - MP3 - WinAmp will still stay in the heads of ordinary users for a long time.
As the idea with skins has quickly settled down in masses, thus it's no wonder that soon lots of programs, also allowing the user to change their exterior, appeared. As you might have already guessed almost all of them were various mp3 (and not only mp3) players. Sonique, K-Jofol, Cool Player... All of them were the descendants of Winamp, which was still alive. Nevertheless these programs are not only Winamp clones, they also give a user (and skinner, for sure) something more: the ability to change form. It's a pity, but the size of Winamp's main window, equalizer and playlist are strictly fixed. You can't alter their form (even though there's a transparency support in Winamp 2 skin format, like in GIF, this feature is still very limited) of their windows and control elements, like moving them and swapping the buttons. Sure, modern skilled skinners have learned to bypass these limitations and bugs of the format (yes, they exist...) to some extent, though the same limitations don't allow the author to implement his idea completely. On this point skinning is slightly similar with demomaking: try to surpass other works with a very limited set of abilities. However, skin formats of modern applications, like Winamp 3 or Playa 2, give much more than their forerunner just a few years ago. There is transparency support (viva PNG!), almost any form and disposition of control elements and much more. In order to create any more or less serious work in the new format it will take from you not only the ability to draw very well, but also knowledge - some basics of XML. Yes, yes... It's not a mistake: XML has become the imprescriptible part of modern skin formats: from Winamp 3 to Trillian.
Unfortunately, the average level of works on the same www.winamp.com is very low. From one side it's adversely affected by the limitations of the format, from the other side - a crisis of ideas, low level of professionalism and pure "ripping" of others' works. So, let's turn back to our players. Sonique, as I think, hasn't become the leader of popularity in two reasons: high (for its time) system requirements plus the fact, that to the moment of its release Winamp held quite strong positions. What about high requirements to hardware, this is typical for a big part of modern software products. (Modern generation of programmers have forgotten about "the language of gods", Assembler, and prefer to make huge and slow programs in Visual Basic). What about the second reason, it was too late to do something with that, so a big number of really qualitative products have been "off the board".
It should be mentioned that we're now going through a real boom of programs with changeable interface: now not only media players (Sound Forge Siren, Ultra Player) could boast of this feature, video players (The Playa, RadLight), but also various Internet browsers (Opera, NeoPlanet), calculators (Biromsoft Calculator), Notepad replacers (KewlpAd, Notepad Pro) and an unlimited number of other programs. If even such a monster as Microsoft has built in skin support in the latest (7+) versions of their Windows Media Player, that means something... However, is everything so good as it may seem at first glance? Not so. First, skin support (especially of the modern ones, with the level of Winamp 3) requires quite a lot of system resources even for a standalone program, so I'd recommended the owners of "weak" computers not to run for the fashion, but first consider all "for" and "against". One of the samples of such beautiful and slow programs could be the same WMP7 by Microsoft. As a result, on my Celeron 333/192 even listening to an ordinary mp3 song with the vis turned on leads to sound fades and gaps as a minimum and hanging on the system as a variant. And at the same time Winamp 3 beta plays DivX (yes, yes... it's not all it can do...) videos without problems on the same computer. Next, the quality of works...
As I have already mentioned, even on www.winamp.com/skins there are quite a lot of works of below average quality, I don't even want to mention less popular sites... So what shall we do? Once having the same question I made a search for the Internet sites, providing free skin archives for download. That's what I've managed to find:
www.winamp.com/skins - the fist site where an ordinary user starts looking for skins. And it's in vain... Talented works are quite hard to be found in the stacks of garbage, like "official Britney Spears skin", and comments are often written by persons that lack intellect. Cataloging, search, ratings and so on... This all exists, for sure. But what for? A search of good works on this site is not rarely equal to looking for a needle in a haystack.
www.1001winampskins.com - quite a big collection of skins for Winamp. Recent works lists, ratings, somewhat like sorting (how could you ever make a more or less serious sorting of skins?). In general it's somewhat like a micro analog of www.winamp.com (with better quality, though).
www.skinz.org - This site has a relatively small amount of works for every more or less popular program. Lots of quality works could be found here. For those who are lazy to make selections themselves there's a sorting on popularity feature. There's also a feature (like on most of other sites) of leaving your comments (you must become a community member first) or contacting with the author of the work. From the disadvantages I could name popup windows (well, we know how to fight with them :wink:)
www.lotsofskins.com - quite an inordinary resource. In spite of a "heavy" graphical design and relatively small amount of works per category, the quality is high. The slow activity of submitters (people who send their works) is compensated by the high level of professionalism of what already is on the site.
www.skinbase.org - almost the same could be said about it. Lots of good works.
www.deviantart.com - my favorite one. New works appear constantly, the number of works in each category is quite big, the quality is high enough. Lots of comments on the works, ratings, a feature of sorting on the number of downloads and so on. There's also the possibility to view other works of the author you like and visit his homepage in search for additional information. Each subscriber has his own page with a list of all of his works and their rating, comments by other subscribers and much more...
Those who burn with the desire to make their own skins for the program they like, I could give some hints based on my own experience. In spite of the expansion of the Internet it's not always an easy task to find a more or less good skin format description for this or that application. You could almost forget about tutorials and manuals: even for Winamp 2 (with its popularity!) they are few in number and either absent or exist in single version for other applications. So you'll have to examine others' works, "spying" the technical realization of these or those fragments and also follow the known cut-and-try method. Don't be afraid of asking: if the work's author doesn't consider himself the image of God on Earth (this is mostly typical for talentless ones or simply idiots), then you have a good chance of getting the sensible answer even from popular authors (besides, it's pleasant to get feedback from any of them). Try to get rid of stereotypes: it's better to spend a week on developing your own original design, than afterwards getting a copy of the "default Winamp skin" or so; there's an unlimited number of outstanding ideas around, don't miss them. And, finally, don't despond: few ones can get all from nothing and the rating dependence of the quality sometimes is out of any logic... After all, who are you making your works for: yourself or others? :)
Comments, bug and inaccuracy reports and so on are welcome. The author would like to thank Mary Gileva AKA Imagine AKA Gileva for her help on writing this article.