My problems with WinStyles (long)

I agree w/ you gorman...
WinStyles is a perfect app for skinners such as Treetog, Alex and Dangeruss and any others that design their very own "Full" skin suites and "Then" create "their own themes using WinStyles" as a main package created solely by the artist.

but as far as someone else coming along and throwing in Jane Doe's and John Doe's skin in a package deal for download this will swallow up the "Best Part" of Skinning!
(plus how many creators will actually take the time to properly notify the original artist of the skin before creating the theme right?)

yeah this should be interesting...

Oh, boy... It'd been a while since someone tried to pin the downfall of Western civilization on Stardock.

Anyhoo...

"By simply creating a pack of skins for download, each individual author loses nearly all credit for their work, and they'll lose a good portion of the comments and feedback they might receive due to their skin simply being packaged with 10 others. Their skin is simply part of a group now, and all individuality of it is lost. The user sees the work, uses it, but it all ends here. Thus, WinStyles is a virtual vending machine for skins. This is a big, big problem."

It's not a problem at all. Skin authors still need to give their permission for their work to be included in a theme.

"This program hurts everyone, including you. It hurts the artists by eliminating individual feedback from the people who download their work,"

This is a pretty big assumption on your part. If I download a disparate theme made up of skins that "sort of" go together, it's perfectly possible I'll look up the name of the artist, and send him/her feedback if I so choose.

Also, you seem to believe every person who downloads skins the old fashioned way automatically will leave feedback for the author. I only do this when I REALLY like a skin. I make it a point to congratulate the artist, and leave my opinion. Other than that, as callous as it sounds, sometimes I don't even remember who's done what skin.

" and as a result stunting their growth as an artist. Many artists are greatly dependent on comments to improve their work, and this is a key point of most skin sites; without these comments, the community will come to a basic stand still."

Again, pretty big leap you're taking there. Aside from assuming feedback is guaranteed when a person downloads a skin as an individual entity, you're also assuming NO ONE will provide feedback for skins that are part of a theme.

"It also hurts the artist by removing the majority of recognition. By looking for skins individually you see the person's name, can easily view their profile and see other skins they have uploaded, and get a much more personal feel of things."

Not everyone does this, believe me.

"Granted the author has to give permission for their work to be in a WinStyles suite, it still does not resolve any of the above issues."

Think a little more realistically and you'll see your "issues" are more akin to "paranoia."

Don't like the idea of your work being part of a suite? Don't authorize their use. Simple as that. Let others do as they will.

"It hurts the skin sites (such as WinCustomize and DeskMod) by reducing the overall interaction, not to mention the page views."

Oh, brother.

"Comments will go down, downloads will drop on everything besides the WinStyle suites,"

Now you're assuming all community members will flock to the themes sections...

"and the whole point of the site will slowly crumble. "

You've been reading "The Fifth Horseman" too much.

"Although something of this catastrophic level is not likely, this program certainly enables the possibility. The whole sense of community greatly deteriorates, and that really will hurt the sites."

Let me ask you something: Do wallpaper and icon artists suffer because Non-XP users can download Plus! Themes that include icons, walls, and webview items? Didn't think so.

"In addition to all of that, you are also hurt. No longer are you able to easily view other work by the artists because you do not go directly to the page with their upload. You do not have the opportunity to make contact with the artists, leave your opinions, or further contribute to the community."

I've called you on your wild assumptions so many times I'm starting to get bored.

"This really hurts the overall experience of going to a skin site, and being part of the community. Those reading this certainly know that."

Don't ASSUME you know what I think about the issue. Everyone has their own idea of what ther community is. Don't impose your own on the rest of us.

"Last, but definitely not least, this hurts application developers. All of a sudden, their program loses its identity. No longer do you have to change the skin through the application itself, now you simply use a Stardock program to change it all. Imagine how many people will think to themselves "I made my desktop look pretty with WinStyles", this removes lots of appreciation for the individual applications."

If they use the application, they appreciate it, and know it's not WinStyles that provides its skinning ability.

"This is very similar to the appreciation for the artist that I talked about previously. Although this is probably one of the smaller implications of this type of a program, it is certainly not one to ignore.

Overall, I can understand why Stardock would think this is a good idea, but I personally feel the negatives outweigh the positives. It makes things easy, but it causes many problems while doing so. Granted this is a great way for Stardock to increase awareness of their brand, in return it does the exact opposite for applications that it skins. If this program really gets big, it will ultimately ruin the community."

No, it won't. Convergence didn't ruin it, Desktop Architect didn't ruin it. WinStyles won't ruin it.

Wondering:

1. How does one give or deny permission to include one's skin in a suite?

2. Where are the skins downloaded from?

What's to stop someone from including other works, without ever asking for permission?

Gorman, very interesting "facts" put forth here, verses remarks made here that have no facts just showing anger and useless remarks......... if FIrestorm don't know who the artist's are on majority of skins she has, even though the authors name is underneath every skin in the componet manger , how would the "newbie" know or even know the rules....... the rippers are going to look little compared to this just my opinion!

The exact same thing that stop people from doing it right now. US. Every time some one includes a wall with a Windowblinds skin that they didn't create or ask permission to use they get jumped on by everyone and a moderator yanks the skin. Same thing happens with DesktopX, LiteStep, NextStart, etc. anytime somebody uses anyone else's work without giving proper credit they get slammed.

Maybe more work for moderators/admins, but hardly "The End Of The World As We Know It"....

chichigirl46: I never said they were facts, just my personal opinion. I'm not angry at all, I'm just putting forth various scenarios about how I feel this program could negatively affect things.

Firestorm: Good post, although you took some of the things I said the wrong way. I'm not assuming you'll agree that this will ruin everything, I meant that I assume you'll agree that commenting and interacting is the base of the community.

Overall, my post was taking a bit too seriously I think I'm simply trying to bring up points about the application so that hopefully SD can try and resolve some of them somehow. It was more a post to get people thinking rather than to flame SD or just rant in general. I don't think it came off how I intended, and I'm sorry for that.

chichigirl, I'm sorry if I gave the impression I don't know or care who created the skins I use (I've known and liked your work since long before I joined WinCustomize). What I AM saying is that sometimes I do look through the archives and download a few older skins and just don't pay attention to who created it unless I REALLY like it. If I can be careless about it sometimes, you can be more than certain the average anonymous user can be worse.

gorman: You're right, I did take it too seriously (ask anyone, I do it all the time.) But come on, the bane of the community? That'd be rippers and trolls, not a simple utility.

For the record, I use WinStyles to package themes I like, so I can switch between looks more easily in my own computer. I have no intention of distributing suites containing others' work. This, I think, is one of the big reasons SD had for creating it.

I thinks we will have to wait and see what happens.

Something does irritate me about this program downloading skins from sites other than wincustomize, but I suppose Brad and the gang have done all the talking to make this ok.

Some good points here for heated debate.

From my perspective Winstyles is the first program that ever came out the skinning community that is aimed more at the poor user that wants to theme their PC, rather than at just giving skinners something to skin. Maybe a opinion that is a bit blunt but, as was recently pointed out on the news pages here at Wincustomize, in many ways themeing etc is really begining to take off going by the number of page hits the site is seeing.

Having downloaded them here and at other sites, I am more than familiar with who created all of the great artwork on my PC. Likewise I am also more than aware how each program allows me to change it's look. At last I need never worry about that dreaded day when windows goes toes up (unlikely with XP but then you never know) and I end up having to re-install everything all over again - and then go through each and every program installing the skins I want used. One hit and the whole shebang comes up and running just the way I like it - hey and you know what - thats the way Joe Bloggs wants things to work also.

There are a lot more Joe Bloggs in the world than there are skinners.

"For the record, I use WinStyles to package themes I like, so I can switch between looks more easily in my own computer. I have no intention of distributing suites containing others' work. This, I think, is one of the big reasons SD had for creating it."

Ok, but whos gonna stop the persons that will do this ? There is more then just websites to get skins from...IRC, ICQ, Newsgroups, etc.

Thats something that goes on allready I think, and might increase with ready to install packages. I rather see a zipped theme by one author then the possibility to get a package of some of this, and some of that, so the user has no idea from who the skins come from.

my 2 euro cents

What I feel it comes down to is not as many people are making suites as there should be.

If more people would work together on an idea and then upload it labeled as a team project then it would avoid this problem.

To make it a try community takes help from others. If you skin windowblinds and make wallpapers only then why not announce that you are looking for some help on making a suite. All you need to do then is share the credit equally with the other skinner(s) that make the other components.

If someone gives permission for someone to make a new skin for an already existing one they should just slowly expand upon the idea above but give credit in a txt file or something to the additional skinning. Then it is as simple as just updating the .suite file.

-=NcroSanct=-
-=CommUNITY=-

I get the distinct impression people haven't used WinStyles and are commenting based on fear rather than actual use.

Let's make sure we put a few items on the table that are key to remember:

Stardock != Microsoft. That means that changes in WinStyles and how it works are on the table. So if users or website admins or skin authors object to certain ways it works, we can alter it.

Let's break down the major issues at hand:

(1) WinStyles takes away from skin author credit.

Response:
https://www.stardock.com/temp/ws.jpg

You can't even create a .suite file without including credit for who did what. There are two formats that WinStyles supports - .xptheme and .suite. .XPTheme should be pretty straight forward good for users and skin authors. No respecting skin site is going to accept .xpthemes that contain rips. Just as they won't tolerate rips of wallpapers and skins. This is no different. A .xptheme is just a ZIP file renamed that contains teh various app skins.

.SUITE can be a bit scarier though and it's open for discussion. A .SUITE is less than 1K in size. It is, in effect, a portable skin site. When you apply a .SUITE file, it goes out and downloads the skins from the place the .SUITE maker tells it to and WinStyles then grabs them and applies them. I uploaded the Beige .SUITE file here today for instance even though I created none of the skins. My submission doesn't include any skins or themes, it just points to the URL where users can get them (no different than a screenshot that manually states where you can get them except that a .SUITE file requires the user to list who made each part).

2) WinStyles hurts skin sites.
Response: THIS I have to agree with to an extent. .XPThemes don't hurt skin sites. But .SUITEs could because the site doesn't get a page view. However, the download count on components IS increased of the individual components on .suites.

What can we do about this? We could require that they only use WInCustomize. But then the "Stardock is the devil" crowd will say we're trying to lock people into WinCustomize which was the reason we made it so that any URL could be used (we had thought about tying it directly to our skin database to make it even easier to use but that would have required it to tie only to Stardock's database).

We're open to suggestions. However, this sort of thing happens already. The popular shell program, Talisman has no actual skin library of its own. It links purely to other people's skin sites (that's why Talisman skins are alwas highly ranked on skinz.org - Lightek links to them from their site). ICQPlus is doing the same thing to Deskmod as I type this. WinStyles .suites are the same sort of thing.

3) About not appreciating the applications.

Response: This I just totally disagree with. I would say it's just the opposite because each application is very highlighted in it and it increases awareness of these applications. The user does, afterall, have to go out and download these programs to use them.

We originally were ONLY going to support Stardock apps but once again we knew that the "Stardock is the devil" crowd would accuse us of trying to lock users into Stardock software so we put in the effort to support third party applications as well (including quite a bit of work to support Hoverdesk).

I would argue that WinStyles is the best thing to happen for skinnable application developers. If they maek a good app, now they get exposure by being able to leverage the strength of better known skinnable programs. Example: If Hoverdesk is felt to be better than say ObjectBar, then people will use WInStyles to include Hoverdesk themes with their WindowBlinds skin and Icon package. That will in turn get a lot of new users interested in Hoverdesk (which is one reason why we wanted to only support Stardock apps in the first place but we're trying to be fair here).

4) Decreases author interaction with users.

Response: Disagree again here. This could actually be increased. If we were somehow to switch it to be a WinCustomize only file solution, then we could let people comment on components directly from the program. But again, this would get a different group upset.

Another solution might be for the suite creator to be required to put a link to the comments field. For instance, on Beige, I could just add:
https://www.wincustomize.com/comments.asp?SkinID=2158&Lib=1

Or this could just be optional.

5) In General - good or bad:

Response:
Most of you knwo I'm a statistics nut. But it is with good reason. We all tend to forget how big the "community" is. It's not 60 guys on #skinnerz anymore. On WinCustomize alone there are 40,000 people who visit this site nearly every day. There are something like 10,000 peole who visit this site more than 3 times per day. I suspect the stats at DeviantART and Deskmod aren't much different.

It's for those people that we want to serve too. When I upload a screenshot of my desktop, I want to be able to say "You like this? Here's a 1K file you can apply and you can have the same desktop. Isn't skinnign cool? Wouldn't you like to make some skins? Wouldn't you like to try out more apps?" WinStyles makes customization much more accessible to those 40,000 people who visit daily let alone the other 700,000 who visit at least 1 time per month.

I don't know what to think of this...
I understand that it's cool to be able to have suites with skins, but I am still hesitating. I like to know when/if people include my stuff in a suite. Even if my skins isn't REALLY physically in the suite file.
And the comment bit also bothers me. I strive for comments (call me insecure if you will, hehehe!). Maybe you should add the email address of the original skinner a compulsery field, so that when people apply a suite they can with one click send an email to the skin authors?
Dunno. Just random thoughts.

I do like the idea of having a link to a comments field for the original skin. That might actually INCREASE greatly the number of comments.

I agree, paxx. I'd also like to know when people are including my stuff in a suite. I'd prefer they not include anything without asking first. Another one of the issues I have is that they might be including links to old or outdated versions of themes when newer ones are available elsewhere.

frog: I'll drop my anti-SD stance forever if this is open sourced, so individual app devs can add their own apps to the spec, and they get folded in. Otherwise, it's a case of one company holding the strings.

I currently consider stardock to be, at its core, pretense on the surface set aside, to be evil. This could prove me wrong, if done properly.

(to be properly open-sourced, a non-app dev would have to be maintainer, I think - gorman, jark, or someone they could agree on recommending, would be a good place to start).

Spare me your melodrama.

fair enough - I'll take that as a "we like control", IE, no. nice community support, eloquent response to this supporting app devs

More like a rejection of elitism.

A rejection of "We just spent a year writing this but let's go open source it to make some self-important guy agree that we're not 'evil' even though he has no reason to think we're 'evil' in the first place."

During development, many times, we thought how ironic that a program like WinStyles wasn't done by a certain numerically named team of holier-than-thou coders since it was well within their ability.

I measure people by their deeds, not not warm fuzzy words. WinStyles, today, right now, supports virtually every even remotely popular program out there that's skinnable. It doesn't just support Stardock stuff, it supports things ranging from NeXTSTart to Hoverdesk to Beatnik.

It's easy for a guy who never has to actually put forth WORK behind it words to demand others give up their work.

Stardock isn't "evil" but it IS a business. And I don't consider you to represent any sort of "community" that I would want to be apart at this point.

The "community" I think of isn't made up principally of roughly a dozen self-appointed guys who rarely make skins, barely write code, and when they deem to grace everyone else with their presence tend to sit there and put down what other people do calling them "evil" (the term "Evil" bandied about people who write eye candy software is ridiculous to begin with) or "Nazis" or whatever.

If you actually wrote real code, you might have an understanding why your demand that we just hand over a project we've been working on over a year to other people for no other reason other than satisfy your holier than thou attitude is not likely to have much support with us.

Like I implied earlier, go get your buddies at 545 or whatever to write one of these and release it as open source. It's well within their ability. Or write it yourself and give it away.

shoggot says:
"fair enough - I'll take that as a "we like control", IE, no. nice community support, eloquent response to this supporting app devs"

Pot to kettle. Pot to kettle.

For a guy who just got done calling people "evil".....