Windows customization on the rise...

I sometimes wonder if we don't exist in a bit of a bubble here at WinCustomize. Is customization really on the rise or is it our deeply rooted need for it to be so that convinces us that it is. After all, we think of ourselves as average, everyday people. We certainly don't think of ourselves as exclusive. We want to belong, just like everyone else, so if we enjoy customizing Windows shouldn't everyone?

I work in a printing company with a huge graphics design department. The department is outfitted with 90 percent PC's and about 10 percent Mac's. The rest of the company is all PC. There is a total of 56 PC's and 3 Mac's in the company. The really strange thing is in the design department there is not one PC with so much as a wallpaper being displayed. These are all very creative people, yet their desktops consist of either Windows supplied walls or just solid colour blank screens. Boring!!

I've often told them of WindowBlinds and all of the OD apps. I pull my hair out sometimes trying to convince them that it's ok to run these. It's ok to liven up the desktop. I try to educate them that some of these apps are more than just eye candy, that they can also be performance enhancing.

Unfortunately, I just kept getting hit with the same old fear of the unknown. They are so sure that anything other than the big design software names (Adobe, Corel, etc.) running on their systems is going to cause problems. My head gets sore from baning it against the wall (no pun intended ) so often.

So, I am left wondering, is alot of the world like that? I mean, if the really creative, free spirited people in our society are too timid to move into Windows customization are we really to believe that the average, everyday work-a-day Joe/Josephine is going to step headlong into this new form desktop expression.

All I can say is, I certainly hope so.

That's a great little article. Brings back some memories of 2-3 years ago, and also the old Skinz days.
I saw one of Shawn Murdocks skins in a screenshot there too.
*Sigh* I miss the old days....

I was in the group that thought it was in "Decline". Just an opinion based on the slowdown in new skins showing up here. Beside that fact that there are fewer skins, there is no standard of quality required to get a skin posted. A skin may look great on the designers machine at 800X600 16bit color, and look like hell at 1260X1024 at 32bit color on someone elses machine. I can't count the number of skins I've loaded up, just to immediately discard them as unfunctional. And this is just those skins based on Stardocks own products.

These are just my observations. No flames are intended.

I think we hit a run of Xp styles which is fading (hopefully). First the walls, then XP compatible WB (good) and XP styled OB. The walls got boring fast. The XP imitating OB are only a bit better than standard XP - imitations.

But I think people are starting to look beyond the XP look to what XP will allow. Personally, I see OB as the harbinger but that may be just because I don't use Desktop XP.

I'd like to see people skinning XP without the need for 3rd party software.

Galfant, why would you want to be limited to what's in the OS? The whole idea of customization is to be able to make your PC work in ways that the designers of the OS may not have thought of.

You can do some basic customization of Windows. Just like you can do some basic word processing and painting and movie making. But to go beyond that, you have to use third party software.

As for skin quality, the moderators (myself included) do look at skins before they go up. I am not sure what skin you refer to that looks different at 1280x1024 from 800x600. Perhaps you are talking about DesktopX themes. What you do have to realize is that skin authors share their work that they made for free, for themselves. Any effort they take to try to make their theme look nice on different resolutions is them being additionally generous.

You might find that the full versions of the software really do enhance your experience far more. Quantity wise, more skins are being made than ever, that's a statistical fact.

From what I've seen, most skinners skin in 1224x768. So I think that that is the unwtitten standard. If they skin in a different res. they usually state so. I feel that skinning is on the rise from looking at the new skinners that has shown up on this site. Most of them (I feel) are the younger generation that has to have it now. That means that they don't have the patients to try and figure it out, or read how to do it. So they ask all the same questions.