Rendering "modern" Winamp skins in the browser
jordaneldredge.com
jordaneldredge.com
This inspired me to do a little research. Sure enough, this unusable piece of garbage is made entirely from my like 16 year old baby face from 20+ years ago. Why I thought that was the one to submit is beyond me.
https://skins.webamp.org/skin/7c0eec4cef92c0c801f4218cee83ca...
Potentially a small correction, I think the 'new' skins were introduced with Winamp 3 not 5. 5 was released because 3 was disliked, and incorporated both features from 2 and 3 (2+3 = 5)
Loading it from the URL on the page linked below, it mostly works! Impressed that most of the animations came across.
stephango.com/impulse
I still miss controlling my music through a little rocket-bike I drew. That was fun.
I commend that dude for doing that. Too many cool github projects just slowly die in a half-baked state because the author moved on, but also doesn't accept PRs because they're either completely unresponsive or just don't want a different style/approach in "their baby".
So just fork it!
Well that's what everybody does then, with the result that there are now 34 forks with different features, Bugfixes, often to the same couple issues, because of course none of the people tried to talk to each other before hitting the fork button. So you come in and try to fix this by creating another fork and merging as much stuff from the other forks as possible. Now there are 35 forks...
I do miss that era of computing, beyond just nostalgia. The web was still in its infancy, and the dot-com bubble was booming. There was a huge momentum of experimentation in tech, as trends haven't yet been strictly defined. We had all kinds of quirky software and hardware. MS Bob/BonziBuddy/Clippy, Tamagotchis, MP3 (CD) players, P2P software, PDAs, beepers, early cellphones, etc. When smartphones came along all of this got consolidated into a single device, for better or worse, and the experimentation happened digitally in the form of apps. That was fun for a few years, but the experience wasn't the same. Now there's a growing sentiment of dissatisfaction towards these devices, and we're finding that technology is only driving us further apart. Anyway, old man yells at cloud...
It did have cool skins.
What a time! Technology felt exciting and so I was (and still am, honestly) an avid fan of Megaman Battle Network. Wild how that series predicted much of tech today.
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I can't remember the name though.
Was it really since Winamp 5? IIRC, I installed them on Winamp 3.
Edit: I just fell into a nostalgia spiral reading Winamp forums. It still has posts from 2000.
However, Winamp 3 also had performance issues, and ultimately the negative reaction to it led Nullsoft to kill most of Winamp 3. The GUI code (and associated APIs mentioned in this blog post) were hacked into the older Winamp 2.x codebase and given the "modern skin" name. (The name "Winamp 5" was supposed to be a play on 2 (codebase) + 3 (modern skins) = 5)
we lost something unique in the pursuit of true usability and reliability. however, i don't disagree with where we've ended up, i think it's a better interface for any human to pick up and use, but yes, i agree, in comparison it is... boring. but is boring really better?
Boring flat UIs are more amenable to being endlessly tweaked and AB tested by product managers with no vision other than “make metric go up”. UIs are thoroughly tested to ensure people will engage with the product as long as possible, in the ways that are most beneficial to the product owners.
It’s the difference between hanging out in your friend’s backyard, and hanging out in Disneyland.
As a user, it sucks. Only way out is to actively pursue and use software made by small, human developers rather megacorps. There is still fun, quirky software out there but it doesn’t have $100M marketing budgets so it’s on you to find it.
In contrast, a lot of classic 1990-2010 stuff was stable and boring because it had reached a point of working well and the visual indicators were consistent.
Now it's more like "pandering to the lowest common denominator of a touchscreen interface, and doing it badly", or "sacrificing good UX in the name of looking different".
I wonder if our current state is a consequence of the 'iteration' of skeuomorphism, where a few decades ago computer UI controls were representations of what people would have been familiar with before - physical buttons on machines or concepts like files in folders, more recently the feedback loop is abstract controls being the input for the next iteration. How many objects in the world that you use in a week give a good template to inspire designers?
Whether MDI was good or not, eh, probably not. But I never would've expected that (of all things) to trigger nostalgia for me.
People have made versions for XP, 7, etc. as well.
Mac OS 9 did this well, but that was because it was effectively single tasking in terms of the user experience.
When portable CD players were still chunky companies would give them a bit more funk, buttons that followed the curves of the device and such. Similarly, before MP3 players went tiny there was some extra space for a bit more design that some Winamp skins would mimic.