I've shown friends my beta of Windows Vista and they love the clean look, the glass UI, the dark Start bar.
But I wonder how they'll feel about it say a month after they've been using it. As I've begun to mess around with the betas more and more, the sexiness starts to wear off and my desire to personalize my experience for my own preferences returns.
What looks like glass at first starts to just be a bitmap that's at 20% opacity with a blur effect on it. Sure, I can change the opacity or the color but essentially, from a customization point of view, Windows Vista is actually a step back from Windows XP in some ways in my opinion. Even XP users could hack uxtheme.dll and apply hacked msstyles to their system. This time, the story isn't quite the same. Now, at best, you'll have someone hacking bitmaps to replace the border and button PNGs/BMPs with another and even then, what do you do about things like Office 2007 which are literally hard-coded.
My prediction is that skinning, which has been steadily growing in popularity to the point of being mainstream (which has not been completely good news for skin sites -- as skinning becomes mainstream, cottage sites become less needed), will take a new turn with the demand increasing even further.
I think WindowBlinds and other Stardock programs will likely see real competitors because the demand for customization will grow much higher.
And I haven't even touched on Microsoft's gadgets which are definitely going to need third party help to be viable IMO. As it stands now, the Microsoft gadget platform is in desperate need of third party attention to expand what developers can do easily so that worthwhile content can be made. DesktopX 4 will likely step up to the plate when it's released but I think you'll see a whole cottage industry for that.
But what do you think? Do you think Vista will be good for skinning or do you think the cool, clean look of Vista will be enough?
