Well there are now 2000 WindowBlinds skins on this site alone.

Obviously there have been a lot more created that were lost with Skinz.org's demise as well as elsewhere. Plus an equal number that never saw the light of day here because they were rips or essentially duplicates (i.e. "It's Luna but a slightly different shade of blue..").

A year ago today there were 1,416 skins here. It probably doesn't come as a shock that we monitor the # of skins being made in various formats. I thought I'd share some of this with y'all.

1,416 WB skins a year ago. And 63 msstyles.

Now, there's 2000 WindowBlinds skins and about 600 msstyles. (an increase of around 584 WindowBlinds skins and 537 msstyles) for a net total of over 1000 new visual styles created in the past year (though quite a bit of duplicates in that 1000, particularly on the msstyles side).

In late April of 2002 themexp had a crash and lost the 559 msstyles it had. It took until October 28 to get back to that number with most of those msstyles being ones that were previously on the site just re-submitted. There's definitey been a significant decreaes in activity on the msstyle side which is discouraging (for us, a skin author is a skin author is a skin author).

On WindowBlinds, we're concerned about seeing the same thing happen. One of the things we're hoping to get in by WindowBlinds 4 is the creation of a new meta skin format. Basically, a quasi-universal skin format that can then be exported by SkinStudio into multiple skin formats. So your skin could be turned instantly into a WindowBlinds skin, a trillian skin or even a Media Player skin (with obvious limitations), or an ObjectBar skin or whatever.

With a meta format, the "compiler" (SkinStudio in this case) could handle the parts you choose not to do and fill them in for you automatically. The best skins would still be the ones where the author created each and every part.

But by allowing users to create a decent looking visual style without having to do every last part, it will hopefully allow new skinners to get into the "scene" gradually.

The meta format could, for instance, create the explorer task panel for you by looking at your title bar, frames and title bar buttons. It wouldn't be as nice as someone who actually took the time to do it, but on the other hand it would still look pretty good.

Plus SkinStudio itself could be put into different modes for different user levels. The beginner could just worry about making the needed buttons, title bar and borders and let the meta format take care of the rest by generating the rest on the fly.

On top of that, we hope with WindowBlinds 4 to support a new technology that will allow for collaborative skins created by skin authors who don't even know each other. Thus dividing the work into parts for people who are interested in doing that.

So the goal with WindowBlinds 4 in 2003 will be to try to make skinning far more accessible to bring in new people while putting in features that let the pros really shine.