> A wonderland for customization
Many people just want to push the "On" button, and point and click and get the work done. Such people (in my opinion) go to Sears to get tools for their workshop, etc. Such people (in my opinion) used to buy the Mac and MS Word (back when I last paid attention to those products: forgive me if either has changed any in the past ten years).
I've never been that way. I've always purchased tools that first of all met my needs and secondly looked as if they'd last longer than I will.
I'd been computing on various girlfriends' computers for 15 years before I finally started shopping for my very own machine. I'd finally started to make it as a writer and, amidst a monumental display of stubbornness, came to admit that I'd outgrown my Smith Corona! (Remember those things?) While I had enough money to go with the Mac, those who knew me strongly urged me to go with the DOS and (then-upcoming) Windows formats, and wouldn't let me buy anything other than WordPerfect for a word processor.
The Mac, they told me, worked the way it worked: you didn't adjust the Mac to meet your needs, you adjusted *to* the Mac and forced yourself to be satisfied with whatever its capabilities were (or weren't). Ditto for Word. What little time I've spent on either product verified these opinions.
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In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the undisputed King of Customization was WordPerfect 5.1 (which is why I'm shocked and dismayed that *nobody* seems to have honored this product with even a single icon that I've been able to locate). I still have my copy of this book that explained every single macro command built into the last good MS DOS version of that program. I studied WP to the point where I could type in the code and my programs would work right off the bat nine times out of ten.
Except for the fact that I'm currently on an extended sabbatical, I still have that program open a good six to ten hours each and every day -- and all I ever save out are ANSI text files: I use it not for its layout capabilities but for my ability to customize the GUI!
Thus it hasn't surprised me to watch the skinning world grow the way it has over the past eight or ten years. While I can't pin it down, I can relate:
When we were boys, we'd go into the canyon behind our homes, shovels and picks in tow, and build these things we called "forts." We'd crawl through the desert underbrush of Southern California and dig a hole so deep the surface was above our heads. Then we'd put this piece of plywood over it and sit there for about ten minutes, talking about how neat our new fort was. Then we'd go home to wash up for dinner. The next day, we'd find the old piece of plywood, fill up the hole, and find a new place to dig a new hole.
It never dawned on us to be satisfied with the fort we'd spent so much time building, because we found our fun in the building itself. Once we got finished, so was our satisfaction.
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Sure, there's probably something to be said for the (old-school) Mac an' Word way of doing computers. But frankly, I cannot tell you precisely what that is! Long before people skinned their applications, I embraced many of the basic philosophies of skinning. I see little difference between skinning and rewriting a WP keyboard script.
Yeah, I'm not interested in new and better ways to make a the edge of a taskbar transparent as long as I cannot see the 16x16 icons in List View. I'm don't really care about backwards compatibility when so many web page authors (and several skin authors, I hate to add) expect me to be able to read eight-pixel type on a 1280x1024 monitor using fiftysomething eyes. I'm not worried about the speed of a broadband connection when there's still no On-Off switch for those looping, flickering Flash banners that make reading most commercial web sites almost impossible. (Isn't there a "don't play animations" setting on most browsers? What makes Macromedia think they're so special that they alone can ignore it?)
When I set all that aside, however, I see the most important aspect of skinning: I see young artists like I grew up with and young designers like I was making for themselves an entire world with which to display their talents.
The Cliff-Walking Fool
