What happened to the customization community?

[szo]

There's a natural explanation for that, Windows looks good, there's nothing to improve, they had to move to Mac so they had something to improve.

I doubt it, you really cannot customize much on OS X like how you could with windows xp. The most you can nowadays do is icons. Window designs are rare and hard to find with system file edits. With the release of Mountain Lion, there isn't anyway to change the dock even. And yes OS X apps have some best designed icons ever. You should see the attention to detail. Just checkout dribbble.com. The same can be said for iOS icons. OS X is meant to have neutral colors to the eyes and let the user work.

The problems in the design of OS X are small cosmetic issues with certain applications such as the linen, the leather used for calendar and address book. Hopefully this ugliness will be removed soon.

[Lirodon]

There's a natural explanation for that, Windows looks good, there's nothing to improve, they had to move to Mac so they had something to improve.

Check that; the Metro stuff does look decent, but how they've done it on the desktop is downright awful.

[+Raze Subscriber²]

I miss KoL and his work...

http://javierocasio.deviantart.com/

[Denis W. Veteran]

Have to agree with everyone here. Those days were great with awesome visual styles for XP popping up every week or so.

For Windows Vista the themes I used didn't go further than changing the glass effect or the taskbar. Windows 7, I probably used Zain's visual style once and that's it. And strangely for Windows 8, one of its selling points for me was the move to this simpler visual style. I never quite liked the ugly blue/purple menu and toolbars in Aero. The glass, while nice, did noticebly slow down the desktop experience with lots of windows open - and disabling transparency in Aero, the theme doesn't look that great. Try setting your window colour to be silver, then switch to the power saver mode and see if you can easily read off the time on the lower right corner.

Plus I've on occasion tried to sync my desktop and laptop together in terms of screenshots, while now it's already done automatically in Windows 8.

The desktop visual style in Windows 8 still needs work though - IE10's scrollbars still look bad, and Microsoft needs to let people use dark colours without completely obscuring the minimize/restore glyphs and titlebar text. A simple colour flip to white for RGB values who average to less than 100 should suffice. Even for many included colour selections in Windows 8, the colours are often too saturated to allow the black text to carry visual weight.

Noticed most of the people who created the themes (early days) all moved to the mac.

Including this guy ^ :whistle:

There's a natural explanation for that, Windows looks good, there's nothing to improve, they had to move to Mac so they had something to improve.

That's being quite cheeky... just sayin'.

[HawkMan]

I doubt it, you really cannot customize much on OS X like how you could with windows xp. The most you can nowadays do is icons. Window designs are rare and hard to find with system file edits. With the release of Mountain Lion, there isn't anyway to change the dock even. And yes OS X apps have some best designed icons ever. You should see the attention to detail. Just checkout dribbble.com. The same can be said for iOS icons. OS X is meant to have neutral colors to the eyes and let the user work.

The problems in the design of OS X are small cosmetic issues with certain applications such as the linen, the leather used for calendar and address book. Hopefully this ugliness will be removed soon.

Well while it may not be possible in the latest versions, during vista and the early 7 days, they where rescinding everything in OSX, I recall dark resins where particularly popular but there was a lot of reskinning going on with OSX. And today a lot of people are reskinning to drop the skeuomorphism.

And after all, windows has more built in customization abilities from the get go with users abilities to change the colors of their windows.

As for icons, that's p to the app designers themselves. There re many windows apps with icons that rival or even beat Mac icons, but of course when your app universe is 100 times bigger, there's going to be a larger amount of ugly apps/icons.

Windows users also tend to be more focused on the app working no working good/effectively, whereas an apple users will pick the pretty app over the working app. The App Store shows this effect a lot. Personally, I wish I could have both, I wish my mirc could have the function of mirc with the mdi windows, or a tileable interface with the looks of one of the nice new metro irc clients.

That's being quite cheeky... just sayin'.

Cheeky doesn't make it untrue :p

[SiCKX]

Win XP customization got me here. :)

The biggest names in the "field" got older, switched to Mac or found Vista/7/8 uninteresting to skin. devART still has a TON of themes for Win 7 and few for Win 8 already, the problem is back in the days I wouldn't see the amount of absolute crap that gets posted in the Visual Styles section. Tons of kids with themes that instead of being a delight to the eye they burn it, just morons who steal and upload to hosting sites that give you $1/1000 dl's or girls (possibly boys disguised as girls to get attention) that make known good themes pink. Funny as all these "girls" talk spanish and never give credit because "sorry no speak english".

Speaking of older great XP themes and creators you could check these ports to Win 7 from lassekongo83 made by charleston2378:

http://charleston237...-Port-336142888

http://charleston237...2F16831472&qo=1

http://charleston237...2F16831472&qo=2

lassekongo83 is only interested in Linux of what I know.

[kawasabi]

Vista and 7 were horrible out of the box for me.

Stupid glass and those round corners.

Had to mod it.

Thank god 8 doesn't have that.

[szo]

Well while it may not be possible in the latest versions, during vista and the early 7 days, they where rescinding everything in OSX, I recall dark resins where particularly popular but there was a lot of reskinning going on with OSX. And today a lot of people are reskinning to drop the skeuomorphism.

And after all, windows has more built in customization abilities from the get go with users abilities to change the colors of their windows.

As for icons, that's p to the app designers themselves. There re many windows apps with icons that rival or even beat Mac icons, but of course when your app universe is 100 times bigger, there's going to be a larger amount of ugly apps/icons.

Windows users also tend to be more focused on the app working no working good/effectively, whereas an apple users will pick the pretty app over the working app. The App Store shows this effect a lot. Personally, I wish I could have both, I wish my mirc could have the function of mirc with the mdi windows, or a tileable interface with the looks of one of the nice new metro irc clients.

Cheeky doesn't make it untrue :p

Not always true! Being pretty does not equal good usability. Look at app called tapedeck.com. Looks nice and like a tapedeck, but it's useless and superflous when it comes to usability. Good designed mac apps also have very good usability. I can mention some nicely designed designed mac apps with good usability such as Evernote 5, Coda, Sparrow and many more. It is really hard to find well designed apps on windows. Microsoft is the exception and they're one of the few who make well designed software such as office and more. Being pretty does not equal good design. I think Mac users get a bad reputation about having pretty apps. I can assure you that tons of mac users hate the skeumorphic design style and really strive for good design in apps because it helps in being more user friendly.

[Hum]

Visual styles, desktop screenshot threads. I've been gone for awhile, but where did everyone go? Was it just a fad, gone by the wayside?

With the ho-hum looks of Windows 8, I'd think customizing would be very popular now. ;)

[Raa]

It feels like Microsoft doesn't want you to customize as much anymore, and that sucks! :(

[szo]

It feels like Microsoft doesn't want you to customize as much anymore, and that sucks! :(

It's quite harder to customize the uxtheme.dll or whatever it's called these days. Microsoft have kinda locked it.

[+jamesyfx Subscriber²]

When I used Windows 98 I found it quite interesting to be able to improve the way things looked with utilities like WindowBlinds, and to a lesser extent Windows XP. However, over the years the quality of what was available went down and down, and bafflingly a lot of these hideous looking visual styles and themes had a fee attached to them which I could never really understand.

[szo]

When I used Windows 98 I found it quite interesting to be able to improve the way things looked with utilities like WindowBlinds, and to a lesser extent Windows XP. However, over the years the quality of what was available went down and down, and bafflingly a lot of these hideous looking visual styles and themes had a fee attached to them which I could never really understand.

Have seen some of the ugly themes of wincustomize. They had crap like animations and what not in the startmenu and window frames.

I think the best themes that i found were the clean and minimal themes found here by kol and others here in neowin.

[ryokurin]

Look at most of the popular skins on Wincustomize. the majority are still designed for XP, and just like five years ago, most of them are shiny and gradients. Cool when you are 15 but in the end hard to use. the Vista and 7 skins are still mostly transparancys which actually make the OS hard to use. And while they did try to make it so that a skin could be used on either OS you still had to occasionally go in and tweak things to get it right and I just don't have time for that nowadays.

[remixedcat]

Used to be into it but it's one more thing to mess with after a format and fresh install. I do use rainmeter though and I do change my fonts and that's about it. I also add a slideshow of my abstract wallpapers :)

[Joseph B]

I remember resource hacking XP until fragging the entire install, multiple times, so many screenshots of the proud work i've done just lost in the sands of time... Or deeply hidden in my post history, whichever.

Those were good times, but I too have just lost the desire since Aero, why fix something that isn't broken?

[Fraud OS 11]

So Stardock's Decor8 may get wildly popular? Until a free app comes along that does the same thing. I wonder if they just modify undocumented registry values or do resource hacker-style modifications.

[Gerowen]

There's a lot of Linux customization going on if you want to hit up gnome-look.org or kde-look.org . Linux is an open platform though so it's not that difficult, and Windows Vista and 7 look pretty decent, so I guess most people haven't bothered with creating or acquiring cracked uxtheme files to mess around with.

[Yakuzing]

I never stopped, but every time I open up the desktop screenshot thread here on Neowin I feel awful when I see those clowns who has to post default desktops each and every month. Also WinCustomize is useless, always been useless.

Only place to get something is deviantart.

And sure too many VS are based on stupid glass, but not all. Placebo is a nice one. APPOWS2010 nice although it has its usability problem in the taskbar.

Popular all time

http://browse.devian...lstyle/?order=9

Also check what's been popular for only a month:

http://browse.devian...style/?order=15

Oh and neiio has released Work (from APPOWS) for Windows 8, looks sweet.

http://neiio.deviantart.com/art/Work-337353688

[Dot Matrix]

I remember resource hacking XP until fragging the entire install, multiple times, so many screenshots of the proud work i've done just lost in the sands of time...

I did the same. Which is why I've stopped. I can't afford to brick my machines anymore. I'm balls deep in school, and work, and just don't have the time to re-install. But I still have old screenshots. :D

[Growled Member]

With the ho-hum looks of Windows 8, I'd think customizing would be very popular now. ;)

They make it harder to do, though. It's no fun anymore.

[0nyX]

Seems like the majority of people finally realized (thank God) that using docks,custom icons,rainmeter skins,gadgets etc results in a much worse and bloated desktop.

After vista u dont really need to customise besides maybe the VS.

Thats why most of the customization screenshots here are awful.Its the same people that have always been using bloatware(since the XP days) and they still do.They even managed to make Win8 to look awful, so yeah...

[Joseph B]

They make it harder to do, though. It's no fun anymore.

QFT. When you have to jump so many hurdles just to get your themes and shells up and running, the average person who wants to start to customize just gets discouraged.