Since the advent of Windows XP, I’ve always been a fervent believer that Windows Classic was the only true look for Windows. This was fueled by a few things:
- On the graphical side: The skins that are built-in with Windows XP suck, although the silver one is a little less worse than the others. The title bars are oversized — especially in the days where screen resolutions like 800×600 and 1024×768 were still the norm — and you are stuck with choosing between happy-blue, dull-green or way-too-bright-silver as the only possible colors. Since I like to match my title bar and selection colors with my desktop background, it’s kind of a bummer. Also, I hate blue. I have a deep, passionated hatred for the color blue, which is even more fueled by the fact that it seems to be the default color everywhere. In fact, the first thing I always did in a fresh Windows install, was to change the blue colors to something else. So the non-ability to change it to say, forest green, was quite annoying. It’s not like it would have been hard to implement skin colorization, WindowBlinds was doing it already.
- On the technical side: The whole UxTheme skin system is such a giant patch over Windows, it almost seems like it was written by a third-party and hastily integrated into the Windows code base. It uses a service with a global hook to apply skinning to the non-client area of windows, and applications have to explicitly request the “new” common controls in order to get skinned controls. This is quickly visible in the fact that console windows, hard error dialogs and WOW windows are not skinned at all. Also, all pre-XP applications still have the “old” controls, which contributes to the overall uglyness. The question is: why on earth couldn’t they — security and stability issues aside — plug the skinning code right into the window manager over the old code? They had the source code, and therefore the ability to do it, but instead they went the other way all around and added another layer of complexity.
But, as time has passed, these points have become pretty much moot. There are now a lot of user-created skins so #1 is not a problem anymore, and almost all applications include a common control manifest so the impact of #2 is quite minimized. Also, computers have gotten much faster since 2001, so the speed impact of drawing a bitmap instead of a solid fill is almost null.
Whilst user-created UxTheme skins have existed for a while, I have only since recently considered even using one because frankly, most of them sucked. They were either oversized, overcolored, had too much details or were blatant rips of Luna.
The first skin I ever used was Royale, although not for long, because it was blue. Not only the title bars, but every control and color had a blue hue. But I liked its glossy look, it was quite a change from Luna’s “deflated baloon” look. The first skin I really used, and fell in love with, was the Zune skin, which was Royale without the blue. It also made me realize that black is a color that fits with every other color, and therefore wallpaper, so I didn’t mind much not being able to customize it.
After scouring the web a little, I found some other good black UxTheme skins. I therefore make a little list here for future reference:
- Watercolor Emico: Black by Gelosea: By far the most beautiful, most usable skin out there. It also comes in flavor of blue, a darker blue, olive green and silver. I use it on all my computers, enough said.
- Zune Desktop Theme by Microsoft: This one is actually by Microsoft itself and was released as promotion for the Zune. It’s basically Royale without the blue, but is not Royale Noir, which still had some blue in it. The advantage of this skin is that, being from Microsoft, it’s signed and therefore needs no UxTheme patch to apply. I use this one at work or in other places where patching UxTheme would be prohibitive.
- Luna Element by tornado5: I’d use this one if the two previous ones didn’t exist. Comes in blue and black.
With these, there’s no reason to stay in Windows Classic anymore!