Many of you reading this have been around since the beginning.

Which skinners, past or present, would you say were instrumental to making skinning evolve from being a technogeek hobby into something that is done by millions of people?

I'm going to name a few people from the really old days that I think were absolutely crucial. This is by no means a complete list, please add your own.

DAK. (Dimitry). He made the WBMania series of skins and they were amongst the first skins to really show why you might want to use a GUI changer.

Luche. He made the "Simple" series of skins. His "Simple" skin was the first UIS2 skin that I saw that made me go, "Wow, this is why we're spending all this time making this software!" (simple v.02 is here).

Decoder. He was the FIRST real skin author for WindowBlinds. He somehow managed to get the primitive original UIS1 language to do neat stuff. We don't even support UIS1 anymore. I really miss Decoder. I haven't seen him around in a long time and he really had a good eye for things.

John Folden. He was the OS master. And the thing I think that helped WindowBlinds beat out say Chroma and eFX is that WindowBlinds could do OS skins better and that's what many of the early adopters used it for (to make Windows look like a Mac or OS/2 or NeXT). John Folden, who went on to help launch NeXTStart, created much of the early OS ports.

Ed Deans. Ed Deans and I have known each other since 1995. He was the Stardock icon guy. He has done every major Stardock product's icon since 1996. Starting on OS/2 and continuing forward on Windows. He's an OS guru. He's made some of the best and most popular WindowBlinds skins (Liquid), some of the best icon collections, and has done Kaleidoscope themes. Lots of people talk about the "skin community", Ed Deans is arguably one of the founders of it.

Allen Bond. He created skins that were useful and just incredibly unique. Ampulla, which I noticed is queued to be highlighted soon, was one of many skins he created. I miss his presence online a great deal.

Mercury. He hasn't been really active recently but he started making skins in early 1999 and continued a steady release of increasingly impressive skins. No skin author yet has created more technologically advanced skins. Some of his skins have done things we weren't aware were possible. He was the first to have animated scrollbars for instance in his skins.

Dangeruss. No list woudl be complete without Dangeruss. Russ was particularly crucial because he helped put a mainstream face on skinning. The responsible adult with a regular job who also liked creating skins was highlighted in a Wired magazine article on the growing movement. Russ also created skins that were particularly..polished. SOmething many skinners of the time failed to do. And he also created the first quality Aqua based skin which really put the world on notice that skinnign wasn't just a bunch of hacker crap. The Aqua skin on WindowBlinds was authentic enough to scare the crap out of Apple and sent their lawyers on a frenzy to remove that skin from every site they could.

Now this is just a partial list. But these and many others are what have made it possible for us all to enjoy such complete customization of our systems.

It is with some irony that Microsoft shoudl be thankful to them as well. One has to wonder how many people might have been tempted to go to Linux for its customization if skinning on Windows hadn't exploded into popularity when it did.