alt Hacker NewsWinamp Skin Museum
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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/
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
one of the best desktop apps ever made, should be in the software smithsonian along with winzip, netscape, a few others from that era.
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.
I don't want to use it, but I would laugh if someone made Visual Studio Code look like Winamp...
OMG, you just catapulted me back to being 12 again!
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.
It took me a while to realize that they are fully working if you click on it.
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!
Winamp is a blast from the past!
ah, brings back memories. third one from the left was my favourite.
The Mr. Bean one is amazing
The first internet memes were just winamp skins
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.