Animated Skins

According to neowin, the next Windows (Longhorn) will have animated skins!

Animated skins! I’m pretty sure all you skinners right now are saying “w00t!” well yes you heard here first. Longhorn has support for your 32bit PNGs and your own animation. So you can not only make things half visible but make them fade or animate into states. Animated push buttons and of course *cough* Mac style *cough* pulsing default options.

Sounds interesting...

http://www.neowin.net/articles.php?action=...age=1&pagenum=6

#25567

so once again Microsoft is *borrowing* ideas from Apple..

#25571

and once agian it looks like sh##.. did you seen the movies about it?

#25572

Hmm.

So, Longhorn will be a next generation upgrade huh? Sounds interesting. But if Longhorn is released, I will not yet upgrade to it.

*Bugs are coming

#25573

Oh GOD.

Borrowing ideas from apple? Animation has been possible in skins in WB since forever. Just look at that old matrix skin with code going down the sides of the titlebars forgot the name of the author. And then later alexandries aquarium skin.

When they had added animation to WB, OSX hadn't even been released yet.

I'm surprised they didn't already have animation in visual styles. This is nothing new.

The reason why not a lot of people used it thus far is because it slows things down more than a non animated skin. And up until recently it worked best for titlebars rather than push buttons.

And BTW why does everyone care so much about the default look, none of us are going to use it.

#25576

Oh yeah I remember now, the OLD animated matrix skin was by mercury. It's called "what is the matrix".

#25577

well... lets just be happy there adding these features in so we can get rid of that ugly blue ass look so now we can change it to what ever we want exactly what smoke said.. heh were not going to use the default look anyways.. lol.... it would suck even more if they made it so we couldnt skin that ugly blue interface.... heh they just love other peoples ideas!

-bolero

#25578

now that you mention it.. I remember an Aquarium skin too...

#25579

I figured out why they didn't have animation in visual styles thus far. They really only made them for the luna theme. They just wanted to change the look of windows in XP really.

Plus, with the 2D rendered GDI you take a speed hit with animation for titlebars. On lower end computers that is, on higher end computers it's not as much noticeable. Though I have noticed with push buttons it doesn't seem to affect things. With the 3D Desktop you can have animation for free I would bet.

AFAIK OSX doesn't have animated titlebars. And mouseovers for the titlebar buttons don't count as animation.

Is there any other animated widgets in OSX apart from the throbbing default push button?

#25589

Originally posted by smoke@May 10 2003, 01:01 PM

Is there any other animated widgets in OSX apart from the throbbing default push button?

progress bars. 2 kinds.

zoom features.

window auto-resize..

#25590

Square thing when programs open, the clicking pill closes the toolbox,

#25592

Ok the indetermined progress bar counts.

But you're splitting hairs with the rest. Window animation effects don't count as widgets like scrollbars or titlebar frames being animated.

#25595

windows zooming out into nonexistence and zooming into existance count or not?

#25596

Nope they don't count as the skin being animated. They are not controlled through the theme.

They are system animation effects. Like things that traditionally are added in windows through a program like windowFX.

So so far the count is 2 animated things in the skin, the indetermined progress bar and the default selected push button.

#25597

OH yeah I almost forgot about the other program for windows that adds the system window zooming effects. Zoom open.

#25600

Originally posted by smoke@May 10 2003, 01:34 PM

OH yeah I almost forgot about the other program for windows that adds the system window zooming effects. Zoom open.

actually I wasn't talking about the zoom rectangular boxes. I dont even like them, and havem disabled.

I was talking about the actual window zooming in/out.

Anyway, you're right. Its not the skin's feature, but rather a built in feature..

#25608

Oh yeah, animation is a real brilliant idea on Apples part. CARTOONS HAVE BEEN DOING IT FOR YEARS. Apple was just the first company to do it. You can't peg MS twice (one for being behind, one for stealing) for being slow.

#25609

Contrasura read my reply again, stardock had animated skins since before OSX was out. And OSX has minimal animation in the aqua skin it'self. If anoyone is copying anyone here it's MS copying the third party shareware\freeware authors. But then again Apple does do this too sometimes. I can name a few examples off the top of my head. In OS9 the control strip, in OSX the new look of itunes.

Now system animations are another thing and that's where apple has everyone beat to the punch. Except maybe some unix desktops. I remember the enlightenment team getting skinning and such into *nix desktops since before most people knew about it.

But yeah, cartoons where animated before everything else.

#25616

I don't see a Start Button ?

#25632

Well, your right, most of the animation comes from OSXs unix core. ie. the animated desktop. Because UNIX allows you to control the thread priority to the bit, it allows for all these effects to happen w/o crashing the system. But then again, 99% of the features of OSX wouldnt be doable w/o unix.

Now dont get me wrong, im not mad at Apple or anything, frankly they did a great thing. They realized their Kernel wasnt that good, so they adopted the open source, and the advanced. UNIX is the best system out there, and by moving to it, they inherited stability,features,and speed into their OS, instantly! MS on the other hand, is still nursing their dying kernel, and trying to keep up w/ unix, but its a losing battle.

My point was that animation (on any OS,any time) isnt REVOLUTIONARY, its EVOLUTIONARY. It was bound to happen, the tech just had to get there.

#25633

actually the speed of Mac OS 9 is faster than Mac OS X, and it uses the old kernel.

#25635

I could have sworn animations in WB skins didnt come untill v3, and OS X was out before then.

Chris

#25636

Its not just speed, its stability and features. And remember, the kernel has A LOT less work to do. Try to throw that kernel into a modern OS and see what happens (WindowsME, LOL).

#25643

Originally posted by smoke@May 10 2003, 03:49 PM

Oh GOD.

Borrowing ideas from apple? Animation has been possible in skins in WB since forever.

Actually, before WindowBlinds came out with animated skins, there were some other programs that already did so.

The one that I remember fondly was Chroma from Thematic.com. It was slower than WB but it had great animated skins. Try out the AquOpteriX which was loosely based on OSX. The scrollbars had bubbles floating and moving about them.

#25647

The reason why OSX has great looking windows for example is because they wrote their UI from scratch since a unix like system doesn't have a UI (rather it relies on a window server, like xfree, or apple's quartz server). I would say though that OSX windows look even better than xfree ones because they are even more legacy free and are more consistent. Although the toolkits are improving and they are getting opengl.

A window in OSX for example is created from scratch using the extras resources. Where in XP it's created and then intercepted by a visual style or WB skin.

Windows has been tied down with it's legacy. It uses a lot of hand me down programs from 9x and they want to keep compatibility where on OSX they ditched that and just made it so you can run a full copy of OS9 on top of it for legacy programs.

I think however the word unix is used too loosely when describing systems. And you don't need to be exactly unix as long as you get the features you need and it's stable enough. Just look at BeOS for just one example.

I however don't think NT is a bad kernel, win32 though could stand some work. Avalon is supposed to change this. Well, let's see if that happens.

Quite a bit of features in XP already though go to waste because most people run as administrator. Like who owns what files and things like that.

#25650