You must log in or register to comment.
Ugh, terrible. Not a single space for an advert.
I still have all the photoshop and illustrator knowledge to make these a thing still, when the world is ready for them again. The bevels. The emboss. The gradients and drop shadows. I member it all. Theres a lot of inset emboss as well
A UI that doesn’t leverage AI, has no ads, and loading it doesn’t take 2GB of RAM??
What’s even the point of it?
Productivity? Stay-out-of-your-way design approach?Madness I say!
. . .
But also reject decades old modernities, return to classic way of life!
(This is from the time before PCs were common & you had to spank llamas via irl devices.)Gothic/Baroque moment of Ul design
It’s called Frutiger Aero you uncultured swine 😤😤
He’s right though
Whatever happened to skins in general, not even just Winamp?
But, but, your custom skins destroy our carefully on-brand design!
CEF and Electron happened. Or, more precisely, web developers decided they are app developers now.
Well, a lot of them have turned into microtransaction purchasables depending on the app/game.
Outside of iPhones you can skin all sorts of stuff in Android
Software used to have personality.
Can’t scale tho, we always thought it looked better even back then but resolutions went up and it looked stupid small so they fix it on the next version but then resolutions went up again so they had to fix it again, eventually they said fuck it and mathematicaly defined everything so it can scale to any screen any size or aspect ratio, it’s better this way despite what we lost.
Nothing is stopping this from being scalable.
Rasterization, you probably could simulate the 3D effect in real time these days although it would be a waste of resources but back then not a chance, you would generate each UI element once and take a picture of it and use that as the UI.
Yeah I was referring to modern day, vector images are everywhere and easy to render. “Waste of resources” is a weird thing to mention because it’s entirely subjective. All visuals could be called that compared to a TUI.
You could totally replicate that winamp interface with vector graphics. You’d only have to maintain the same aspect ratio
Are you saying we should build a 3D rendering engine into the start up file of every application that does nothing but change a few variables??? We could now but why would we? And back then not a chance.
Modern operating systems have hardware accelerated graphics for the GUI. This is nothing new. Apple started doing this with Mac OS X more than 20 years ago. Drop shadows and animations for windows and everything. Windows Vista was when Microsoft started doing it.
The rendering engines are already there and loaded.
Vector graphics are 2d and used in websites all the time. ~NO WAIT don’t make an electron… too late…
This is not Vector it has shading and translucent glass and glare it was made on a primitive 3D engine thinking you could do this with vector is exactly why you don’t have UI like this anymore, you cannot.
Personally, I don’t think this looks that good. It’s just a copy of how the physical hardware looks. People who have only used digital options will say this has character, but the character is just copying what people were already used to. It’s interesting now because most people don’t remember the physical versions, so this looks unique. Back then, the versions we now have would look more unique. It’s all about perspective.
They did have skins though, so it could look like anything. That’s one thing that’s missing from a lot of modern software. You can’t customize it.
Aha I was just thinking that it’s clearly inspired by the silver blue bubble design language Sony used to use.
I do note that it does feel like the flat material design language that still permeates a lot of digital design has been around for far longer than pre 2010 styles.
Only now after what feels like 15 years are gradients coming back. Still not really anything interesting.
🤷
What do I win? I don’t actually use it like this though
Check out Audacious which supports Winamp skins.
Devs seem tied down to the frameworks they use. Creativity shouldnt be restrained by the tools.
Middle management only wants Material Design 3, to show that we are on the cutting edge.
Lol. I asked my devs to add mouse event control (drag, wheel) to a viewer we found on the internet with full, functioning source (it was part of a tutorial). They disappeared, and it been a couple of weeks now… Smh.
The dev tools getting better over time has meant that it’s easier for us to make interfaces that can accommodate a lot of different screen sizes and zoom levels and accessibility stuff. But all those varieties of screen sizes means it’s very difficult to make those nice pixel-perfect interfaces and still work on most devices.
And that’s not even taking into consideration the project manager yelling “FASTER FASTER FASTER” all day. A lot of us would love to return to hand-crafted interface design and take our time to make nice things. But software moved out of the nerd space and just became another place for the MBA’s to colonize. Now it’s all KPI’s and standups and soulless flat minimum viable products that never get improved.
Hey, cool, this was my thought too. Things were just easier when everyone had 1024X768 or so.
Fair observation
It’s hideous
Then download a different skin!
looks better than anything made by big tech in the last 10 years
WACUP is the romhack-like edit of Winamp that still works in 2026
Still use it when I must use Windows!
