Version 6

I have to admit, I'm pretty excited about SkinStudio 6. Which is surprising in some respects because I was deeply involved in the design of SkinStudio 1 through 5.  With SkinStudio 6, the WindowBlinds team wrote it with my part being mostly that of providing input rather than design direction. 

SkinStudio 1 through 5 was designed to provide a quasi-Corel Draw style user interface.  The design worked out well in the early days when WindowBlinds wasn't that powerful.

Here is what SkinStudio 5 looked like:

As you can see, it got pretty complicated by version 6.

By contrast, SkinStudio 6 looks like this:

The difference is application designer versus task oriented design.  That is, with SkinStudio 6, the skinner simply walks through a series of steps and at the end has a finished skin. 

How this will affect the skinning community remains to be seen. But we now have a way for people to easily make their own skins. And best of all, SkinStudio is FREE.