gemini://tilde.pink/~irek/log/20240113.gmi

Today I went back in time to forgotten era of Windows XP Windows Media Player (WMP) skin designs [1]. Barely made it back alive. Then I watched video showing how those where made [2]. This got me thinking. What happen to modding communities? Is our current design goal only about UX and being "modern" trying repeat Apple past success? And mostly - do we still have the skills among programmers to implement such customization?

To me it looks like the best we can do now a days is the light or dark mode in web/mobile applications. Maybe with option to have compact or touch friendly spacing. But nothing near to what was possible in WMP. And even tho most apps have only single layout to maintain it often has famous CSS bugs. We can't even maintain single layout.

The only space where I still see customization of this kind is in Android with keyboards, icons and some effects. This is not what the cool kids use tho.

Is it because there is no business value in customization? Probably not. Nearly every single product I was working on in past 8 years had to had option to adjust look and feel to fit branding of our clients.

It's true that we can't relay on pixels like they did with WMP skins using BMP images with legendary pink #ff00ff color used for transparency. Pixels are easier than flexible responsible layouts. But now we have all those customizable CSS frameworks, libraries, custom implementations and yet if you move single thing on in your app to different place then layout falls apart. Also the separation of view and logic is shallower with each year. React components are tight closely to API calls. HTMX do the same but with templates on back-end. Is MVC model dying?

What I see is that we have all the tools to make GUI a decoupled part of applications but we fail to do so. This problem will now hunt me until I will have a chance to make software with such flexible layout like MWP had. I will prove to myself that this still can be done.