In the end, I want full control over everything. With the current software, I can't even control the look of things, so there is a long long way to go.

And weaponzero has a point about alpha.

You could take it further than just antialiasing edges and just use .pngs for total opacity control. Ah, that would be cool

Hehe, Jafo.

But seriously, the former is far more likely than the latter...

A lot of people like it when their user interface has an universal look. Although fun, suites like those of the Skindicate, take a lot of effort to make. End users still have to worry about what skin is supported by what skinnable app. Convergence is a good thing for them, because it makes all those different systems easier to manage. Still we end up with lots of identical graphics not being shared by such apps. Skinnable apps are here because there was no such thing like system wide skinning for Windows at the time. Skinnable apps will probably disappear to make way for system wide skinning and Convergence may be a step to make people realize that.

At the moment WB rules the system wide skinning market, but I wouldn't be surprised if MS is planning something similar to X-Windows. An API (an interface used by software developers) in this direction is slowly beginning to emerge. WXP has its new theming system. I think MS protected its theming system to look what the general public thinks about it. If the public likes it, MS will expand it and either open it up or jump on the band wagon themselves (more likely). Let's hope that this doesn't end up like Kaleidoscope not running on OS/X. That could be another alternative if the public doesn't like this level of customizing.

Projects like LS, DX, NS and HD will move towards ease of use. We are already seeing the results of that. They will be more popular than WB, because WB has less impact on the way we work. These days programmers of customization software are dreaming up what the user interface should look like. The big companies already have started to use user interface and ergonomic specialists. Stardock and other companies working in their field can do this in another way because they have an active user community that gives them feedback and they are listining to it. Freeware and open source projects are starting to listen to their users too. Today's skinners have the difficult task to find the balance between pure art and providing a good interface.

I think applications will move more and more towards sharing data and share the functionality to access and edit that data. Standards like COM and OpenDoc will be more important in the future. Those standards are already being used for some time now and more developers are beginning to realize its power. This will give customization software and users a lot of new options. Eye candy will be combined with functionality for day to day live.

Hardware will have a big influence too. Today we worry about that stretching a bitmap is too slow. In a few years nobody will notice the difference. Hardware accelerated alpha-blending will be common soon. 3D will arrive at the desktop sooner or later. Extremely fast processors and huge amounts of fast memory may make all the overhead unimportant.

Skinning in the future will be a lot of fun for us. It will become a day to day reality for the general public. Maybe some us can even make a living doing skinning with initialives like PiXtudio.