Brad's Skinning Blog: GUI Olympics rants, trademarks, videos, and what's in a skin...

I remember now why I don't like doing GUI Olympics/Championships. The horror...the horror. There's always someone who thinks their entry is the end all be all and wants to make everyone miserable for not being given their kudos.

I'm used to the WindowBlinds community or more specifically, the WinCustomize community. The world's largest skinning community that is also one of the most friendly and mature.  It's a fun place to hang out with. A place where the skinners are more diplomatic than most of the users!

And this week the results of the GUI Olympics were particularly tough because there were so many great skins to choose from. And the icons that have been made have reached quality levels that were simply..breathtaking.  Fortunately, I'm not an official judge. But in a way, I wish I were. Because me and Pat have put massive hours (again) into this contest and yet we have very little control over the results. So if people don't like the results, they blame the contest as a whole which I tend to take a bit personally since I've poured so much time into it.

This is particularly true on the Winamp skins where the judging is mostly at the discretion of the Nullsoft judges. I don't think Voodoo (the Neowin judge) participated in the Winamp judging this week. But the judges are exceptionally qualified. First, my friend Jark, the man behind deviantART, the largest art community in the world. Secondly, you have two judges from Nullsoft itself, makers of Winamp. You'd be hard pressed to find a more prestigious and excellent set of judges than that.  And I think they've done a great job.

The results on the Winamp skins seem good to me. I'm just going by screenshots but they look good. But apparently some portions of the Winamp community weren't satisfied with them so they've taken out their angst on the contest by making it very loud that they think the contest is a joke. And in classic "shoot the messenger" a lot of the abuse was heaped on me personally even though I'm not even involved on the Winamp stuff.

To put things in contrast, on the WindowBlinds and icon packages area I could definitely see artists who could be rightfully miffed. It was sooo close on some of them. One of my personal favorite icon packages, Alloy Bezel, didn't win best themed. In fact, it didn't even place in the top 3. I was made for him.

But did you see Ian Black (vf) out there screaming about it? No. He has class. He's a real pro. And Treetog's PirateOS icons were outsanding too. Designed specifically for the pseudo-OS icon event. And Treetog is one of the most popular skinners in history. But he didn't place in the top 3.  Do you see Treetog out there ranting and raving? No. Again, he has class.

And DigitalChet's Sugarfree skin just barely missed placing in the best themed WindowBlinds skin. But has he written up some long complaint? No. In fact, none of the WindowBlinds authors were out there complaining even though there are over 100 WindowBlinds skins out there. It's about sportsmanship.

But from some of the Winamp artists/coders we get "your contest is a joke!", personal attacks, and other nastiness. Why? Some of them calling the prizes a joke in the Winamp area. Those who know me know that while I have a thick skin, I have a real weak spot for people who mistakenly believe they have leverage. I got email from a couple Winamp users saying how they hate Stardock now (as if Stardock were somehow at fault for the Winamp skin results). Another couple of users threatened to pull their skins out. That's insane thinking. Exactly how does it harm Stardock if there are Winamp skins in the contest or not? If every Winamp skin author pulled their skin, how does that harm us? The contest is there to promote skinning and we wanted Winamp to be involved because we like the guys at Nullsoft and we wanted to help highlight Winamp skinning and help promote Winamp 5. The GUI Olympics has gotten a lot of traffic. Having Winamp in the contest helps Winamp. It doesn't affect Stardock. But threatening Stardock to pull your Winamp skins is akin to threatening Microsoft to quit using ICQ.

There was more than one person at Stardock scratching their heads asking why we included Winamp instead of promoting ObjectMedia / DesktopX media playing. As cool as Winamp is, DesktopX is just as capable of doing media players: Full alpha blending, seamless animation,  all the features of WMP, VB Script, Java script support, etc.  But we didn't feel that ObjectMedia was popular enough to warrant that. Winamp, IMO, started skinning on Windows and we felt it had earned its place.  But the nastiness of the vocal elements of the Winamp community have definitely taken the shine off those warm and fuzzy feelings.

A New Name?

Speaking of traffic, no matter how you slice it, this will be the last GUI Olympics under that name. The US Olympic Commission has requested that we not use the name Olympics. Now, you can debate whether they have the right to trademark the name "Olympic" or not but we're not going to mess with it. So if there's another contest in the future like this, it'll be called something else.

WindowBlinds skinning

I don't think some people realize everything that goes into a WindowBlinds skin. This is particularly true of msstyles advocates who think of a GUI skin via the limitations of msstyles. Hence the complaining of results on the WindowBlinds side has mostly come from msstyles advocates who don't realize that WindowBlinds skins can have toolbar icons, progress animations, sound effects, wallpapers, animation, etc.  Animation, for instance, needn't slow down the computer - particularly if well used. And many of the best WindowBlinds skins this year are truly complete in this regard.

But when the "best overall" skin portion comes to play, I can almost imagine hearing some screaming from the people who think of skins as just being the title bar and borders and maybe a clever Start bar. I don't know what the judges will end up going by. Maybe they'll ignore all the other elements if they're missing.

But personally, I think having replacement progress animations and some carefully used sound, and toolbar icons and such matter to a degree. I get weary of hearing people who say "I don't want all that bloat!" Well fine, use classic. I'm skinning my GUI for a reason. I like it being different. That's the whole point. And my laptop runs these things just fine. They don't slow up my work.

Speaking of work...

In final testing for The Political Machine. Been working on the AI a lot on that. I use my machine very intensely for software development and I have DesktopX, ObjectBar. WindowBlinds and WindowFX running pretty much full time. I always wonder about these people who yell about skinning slowing down their computers. It makes me wonder what they do on their computers that is so taxing. Maybe their computers are infested with Spyware or something slowing them down.

Anyway, I hope I don't sound too cranky. It's never fun to have people tell you that you don't know anything about skinning or calling something you've put hundreds of hours into a joke as you can imagine. I can say that I'm really proud of the results of the GUI Olympics so far. I think particularly the WindowBlinds and icon artists have demonstrated a real level of class and maturity. When I saw the results, I could see why what won won even though they weren't necessarily my favorites (particularly on themed icons). But on the other hand, the quality of these things is just stunning. 28 icon packages, each having >100 icons. That's almost 3,000 icons were created and most of them with sizes up to 128x128 down to 16x16. We're talking massive effort there and the quality is stunning.

On that note, here's a link to a demo I did of some of the skins and icons of the GUI Olympics.