Many of you reading this have been around since the beginning.

Which skinners, past or present, would you say were instrumental to making skinning evolve from being a technogeek hobby into something that is done by millions of people?

I'm going to name a few people from the really old days that I think were absolutely crucial. This is by no means a complete list, please add your own.

DAK. (Dimitry). He made the WBMania series of skins and they were amongst the first skins to really show why you might want to use a GUI changer.

Luche. He made the "Simple" series of skins. His "Simple" skin was the first UIS2 skin that I saw that made me go, "Wow, this is why we're spending all this time making this software!" (simple v.02 is here).

Decoder. He was the FIRST real skin author for WindowBlinds. He somehow managed to get the primitive original UIS1 language to do neat stuff. We don't even support UIS1 anymore. I really miss Decoder. I haven't seen him around in a long time and he really had a good eye for things.

John Folden. He was the OS master. And the thing I think that helped WindowBlinds beat out say Chroma and eFX is that WindowBlinds could do OS skins better and that's what many of the early adopters used it for (to make Windows look like a Mac or OS/2 or NeXT). John Folden, who went on to help launch NeXTStart, created much of the early OS ports.

Ed Deans. Ed Deans and I have known each other since 1995. He was the Stardock icon guy. He has done every major Stardock product's icon since 1996. Starting on OS/2 and continuing forward on Windows. He's an OS guru. He's made some of the best and most popular WindowBlinds skins (Liquid), some of the best icon collections, and has done Kaleidoscope themes. Lots of people talk about the "skin community", Ed Deans is arguably one of the founders of it.

Allen Bond. He created skins that were useful and just incredibly unique. Ampulla, which I noticed is queued to be highlighted soon, was one of many skins he created. I miss his presence online a great deal.

Mercury. He hasn't been really active recently but he started making skins in early 1999 and continued a steady release of increasingly impressive skins. No skin author yet has created more technologically advanced skins. Some of his skins have done things we weren't aware were possible. He was the first to have animated scrollbars for instance in his skins.

Dangeruss. No list woudl be complete without Dangeruss. Russ was particularly crucial because he helped put a mainstream face on skinning. The responsible adult with a regular job who also liked creating skins was highlighted in a Wired magazine article on the growing movement. Russ also created skins that were particularly..polished. SOmething many skinners of the time failed to do. And he also created the first quality Aqua based skin which really put the world on notice that skinnign wasn't just a bunch of hacker crap. The Aqua skin on WindowBlinds was authentic enough to scare the crap out of Apple and sent their lawyers on a frenzy to remove that skin from every site they could.

Now this is just a partial list. But these and many others are what have made it possible for us all to enjoy such complete customization of our systems.

It is with some irony that Microsoft shoudl be thankful to them as well. One has to wonder how many people might have been tempted to go to Linux for its customization if skinning on Windows hadn't exploded into popularity when it did.

Anyone seen that video of Steve Balmer running around screaming "Woooh!" or the one where he repeats "Developers! Developers! Developers!"?

My 4 year old saw that and asked me if it was evil elmo.

Anyone here use Neoplanet? It is a skinnable browser that a couple of years ago was gathering quite a following.

I flew out to Arizona where they're located and visited them once. It was an amazing experience since it was so different than where I work (Stardock). They had resources. I mean REAL resources. $50 million in venture capital, incredible hardware on everyone's desk. They were at the time 4 times larger than us even though they only made the browser which is ultimately an IE control surrounded by a skinnable exterior (one might argue that Inet Tabs is better than Neoplanet).

Their website was a hip cool place to go. Very polished.

Recently though I went over there. I suggest visiting:

http://www.neoplanet.com.

Let me know what you think...

Some of you may hang out on the Kaleidoscope (a skinning program for MacOS) mailing list.

If you do, then you know what I'm about to say probably. Things aren't going so well in the customization community on MacOS. Why? Apple's shut and locked the door. MacOS X may be neat but it's much less flexible than MacOS 9 and earlier and it appears that Kaleidoscope will never work on it.

This is a real bummer because what really is skinning? It is the idea of people of diverse backgrounds saying "I work on these things all day, I want to have the power to customize it to suit my needs."

So if MacOS X is indeed as inflexible as I'm hearing (I haven't really used it yet), this is a sad thing.

Anyone here familiar with what's going on there and want to comment?

My office machine died last week. One of the CPUs went bad (one of two). Ticked off, I started looking at getting a brand new mega machine. My current work machine is a dual (now single) 650mhz P3 setup with 512MB of RAM.

So I go over to Dell's site and look at the top of the line workstations - 1 gig RAM, dual Xeon 1.7Ghz P4's, etc.

Then it dawned on me. Have computers simply lost their umph or has software simply not advanced fast enough to make getting such a mega system worth it?

I remember back in 1991 getting a 386SX-16 and getting a noticeable performance improvement simply by playing around with shadow bios.

But now, the various machines I have here at home don't really show much difference. I have a 1Ghz machine on the other side of this room that I"m not even using to type this (the P3-800mhz laptop is the main machine).

So what's the deal? Unless I'm doing CAD or rendering or something, what is a P4-1ghz (a dual no less) going to do for me, a developer, that a dual 650 setup won't be able to do in almost the exact same amount of time?

What are your views?

Anyone know of a site that has a TON of pop-up ads? Want to really put WebBlinds's SmartBlocker through its paces.

After years of almost being a major player, OS vendor BeOS has hung it up. They've been sold for $11 million (in stock) to Palm. Ironically, Be turned down a $125 million offer from Apple some years ago (doh!). It is believed that Palm will possibly use Be as a potential PDA OS. The desktop OS future looks grim though.

PocketBlinds is the first program for the PocketPC that fully skins Windows CE. It is essentially WindowBlinds for the PocketPC. With it, you can skin the title bar, menus, push buttons, and more. And it's free!

I've been a long time Palm III owner and am starting to think about getting a new PDA. But I'm not sure which to get. I'm starting to get somewhat frustrated with the lack of innovation and advancement with the PalmOS (low resolution displays, relatively limited abilities).

Is there going to be any major updates to PalmOS in the near future that would make it worth waiting for or should I look at getting the next generation iPaq when it comes out. What do you guys think?

For those of you who are interested in the latest greatest video cards, ATI is about to release the Radeon 8500 that is effectively as fast or slightly faster than the GeForce 3. But Nvidia hasn't been standing still either. Oooh it's exciting!