I am slowly working on my new skin too, when its almost complete the last part is the slowest, maby I should finish it tonight...

I wait till holidays. After a normal working day I'm too tired to do anything let alone something as demanding as skinning.

I have several part finished skins I've lost interest in.

You wouldn't believe how much unfinished stuff I have on my system.

I wonder if I'll ever finish it all.........?

That's why I "retired" some months ago. It's just so much work, and truely so little appreciation sometimes. But then I remodeled my home office, and I started to change a few things, little by little, to match my new office color scheme. From there, it just ballooned into some large monster that will never be finished. Or so it seems. I do manage to do most of my skinning at work, and while the wife is asleep. My insomnia is everyone else's gain, I guess. Lately I haven't been all that motivated. I've got about 50 or so skins, etc even completed and ready to upload, but somehow can't find the motivation to upload them. I think sometimes uploading the skins takes more time than creating the skins themselves. After this suite, though, I am more than just "retiring". It will be with a capital "R". Now I just wish I could RETIRE from my real job. hehe

I got to the place that aesthetics bored the crap out of me. I tried to make a skin and it was just the same buttons with a different image on them, and I couldn't bear it. That was years ago now. Appearances just weren't really enough to keep me interested.

Even now, though, when I put something together in my own work I instinctively twist it around to see how it would be useful in customization. It is just hard to commit something that might be really useful functionally when others can absorb it into commercial software without a thank you, and there's always the looming annoyance that next week everything you have made is gonna be broken by the next version of the software.

How soon will it be before the entire library of metaphors we use for UI; "desktop", "icons", "taskbar", etc. are replaced? Is it worth pondering long and hard how to make things more beautiful or efficient when some muckity-muck at MS is gonna decide that the whole framework we build upon is ready for the "recycle bin"? That said, I still goof about with things. I have tons of stuff on my hard drive waiting for me to be motivated enough to glue it onto some app or another. DesktopX looks interesting, honestly.