How utterly uninspiring and boring compared to the designs of talented Winamp skinners of yore. Look, I get it. Corporate design today "needs" to be safe, consistent, and accessible to a broad audience.
The Winamp skinning era represented something fundamentally different from today's design philosophy. It was about personal expression, creativity, and making your tools reflect your personality rather than conforming to a universal aesthetic. When users could fundamentally alter their software's appearance, they became co-creators rather than passive consumers. That's a very different relationship with technology than what we have now, and I hate it.
> Corporate design today "needs" to be safe, consistent, and accessible to a broad audience.
I actually wish we emphasized these values more. The psychology of human computer interaction is still ripe for improvement, but instead we are turning figma art into code.
There’s some great Winamp skins, but for me the peak of expressive, creative UI were OS X themes, XP-era msstyle themes, and Vista/7 msstyle themes tied for first place with classic Mac OS Kaleidoscope schemes closely following.
Some of those OS X/XP/7 themes were gorgeous but also very practically usable. Many still hold up well today, and I’d use them over the majority of themes available for Linux desktops if given the option.
I remember the winamp skins I considered awful that were just a jpeg image of a girl in a bikini or a cartoon character. What lazy design
I also remember trying to make my own after seeing good ones and bad ones. It was tedious and it's shocking that there were actually any good ones ever with how awful it was to create a skin. It was all flat and even more difficult to discern that a The Sims skin.
Material design has setup people so well that you are bored with how good we have it. I would not mind some more creativity in the space, but be aware of how far we have come.
I don't entirely agree with other commenters saying it's uninspired. It is neutral, but many functional considerations go into making a UI framework, and neutrality serves an important purpose.
However, given Material's popularity, I think it's inevitable that poorly designed/unergonomic apps will cheapen M3 a lot in the coming years. Same as it happened with Material 2. It used to be associated with clean, professionally developed apps; then it became associated with the worst of the worst and a lot of mediocre stuff, too. Sturgeon's Law is not kind to these things.
When Matias was in charge of Material, he said the purpose of design guidance isn't to raise the peaks but to fill the valleys. An expert can come up with something that's more appealing/usable than slinging the components together, but someone without that expertise should be able to make something pretty compelling by following the practices set out by people who had it.
Android studio runs terribly on my PC with a lot of ram and good CPU/GPU.
Part of the issues are probably related to running it under GNOME on Wayland. Unrelated to that it fills up my ram as if it was just leaking memory. I was able to make other intellij programs bearable by switching to zgc but android studio won't let me. I like these IDEs but I truly wish they hadn't been implemented in java to their detriment.
Yeah, I also tried it yesterday in Jetpack Compose, it looks awesome. Some of the components in M3E, like the Fab menu, were cool. I was trying to implement this on my own for the past years, inspired by the Google Calendar app.
Material guidelines typically allow for considering "density" and "shape" depending on the device. They don't need to be wasting space, if you don't need touch targets.
I miss skeuomorphism too, but I miss depth, shading, and detail even more. I don’t need my buttons to look exactly like physical buttons, but those things helped so much for distinguishing controls and giving your eyes something more to latch onto without having to resort to garish colors and huge shadows for contrast.
Readit News
The Winamp skinning era represented something fundamentally different from today's design philosophy. It was about personal expression, creativity, and making your tools reflect your personality rather than conforming to a universal aesthetic. When users could fundamentally alter their software's appearance, they became co-creators rather than passive consumers. That's a very different relationship with technology than what we have now, and I hate it.
https://skins.webamp.org
I actually wish we emphasized these values more. The psychology of human computer interaction is still ripe for improvement, but instead we are turning figma art into code.
Some of those OS X/XP/7 themes were gorgeous but also very practically usable. Many still hold up well today, and I’d use them over the majority of themes available for Linux desktops if given the option.
http://old.reddit.com/r/90sdesign/comments/1bzb2yp/the_gizmo...
I also remember trying to make my own after seeing good ones and bad ones. It was tedious and it's shocking that there were actually any good ones ever with how awful it was to create a skin. It was all flat and even more difficult to discern that a The Sims skin.
Material design has setup people so well that you are bored with how good we have it. I would not mind some more creativity in the space, but be aware of how far we have come.
However, given Material's popularity, I think it's inevitable that poorly designed/unergonomic apps will cheapen M3 a lot in the coming years. Same as it happened with Material 2. It used to be associated with clean, professionally developed apps; then it became associated with the worst of the worst and a lot of mediocre stuff, too. Sturgeon's Law is not kind to these things.