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 both 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 personalized 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.
I just had a blast from the past... It’s 2am, I’m in my childhood bedroom on the Sony Vaio computer I received for my 13ty birthday. I’m hooked up to AOL on a 28.8 modem through a 50ft telephone wire connected to my older brothers phone line in the other room. I’m listening to Same In The End by Sublime through Winamp. I’m in an IRC channel with a bunch of script kiddies talking about building AOL Progz in Visual Basic. My computer is running a little slow because I’m burning some music on my 2x CDR through Roxio. I have a programming question so I try searching on Web Crawler. Just as the results come in I’m disconnected because my brother just got home and picked up the phone.
Funny you mention IRC in a Winamp thread, one of the devs (Tag, Tag's Trance Trip) from winamp/nullsoft was active in a IRC that we used to stream/DJ on Winamp. At one point Winamp was developing a music streaming store/service way before Apple, Google, and the rest came along... some great memories of modifying cable modems to unlock more upload capability
I came across 2A in 2000 as a freshman in high school getting interested in web design and it was absolute magic. It was hugely influential on my excitement about the web and by extension my decision to do the work I do now. If I think about it, I can still hear the music loop from v2 in my head.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I also still keep my own collection of music. But streaming is good for discovering new things, yet I'm not subscribed to any streaming service. Reason being that the software they provide is universally terrible.
What I'd really like to see is streaming services offer an API for 3rd party clients to use, so that you could for example have a plugin for a competently architected music player like foobar2000, instead of having to use the unholy abomination that is itunes, for example.
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!
(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.)
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?
Branding. Winamp was in a unique era where companies were just happy to have their software be used, and everything wasn’t about growing/expanding a brand for eventual sale to a megacorp.
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".
That's true of Winamp 2, which was the most popular major version. Its skins were, as you say, basically just bundles of image files that were used to override the built-in assets.
On the other hand, Winamp 3 was a complete rewrite, with a much more flexible theming system based on a custom-designed GUI framework, complete with its own XML-based layout engine and scripting language: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wasabi_(software)
Unfortunately, it never really caught on, mainly due to the combination of performance problems and a lack of feature parity.
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.
Been a while since I last used Winamp, and only skin I remember by name is MetAmpMorphosis, which probably means I used it a lot. Can't find it on the linked Archive page, but here it is: https://www.fimble.com/staver/amp.gif
