Well, a lot of them have turned into microtransaction purchasables depending on the app/game.

CEF and Electron happened. Or, more precisely, web developers decided they are app developers now.

But, but, your custom skins destroy our carefully on-brand design!

Outside of iPhones you can skin all sorts of stuff in Android

Not just skins. Themes in general. Windows 95, 98 and XP had MS Plus! where people could install themes like this and modify Windows to their taste. And now Microsoft won't let you switch to dark mode if you don't have Windows activated.

Customization was one of the biggest reason why I switched to Linux in the early 2000. I could apply a single GTK theme to most of my apps, in one click, while Microsoft was moving away from this. Oh the glorious days of having matching themes for XMMS and Gkrellm, with Compiz and wobbly windows. It's also why I stuck so much to GNOME 2 style of desktops and switched to MATE. I took my multiple years to give up on my favourite GTK2 theme.

But even on Linux now is either white, or boring dark gray. Still much easier to personalize though. I miss the days of ricing my desktop until it looked lit this.

Audacious can still rock winamp skins.

They still had those back then. People just collectively forget the shit we had to put up with like AOL and some dial-up ISPs that provided free Internet on condition that every page loaded with an ad banner iframe at the bottom of the browser.

Audacious, one of the first programs I loved installing when I started with Linux back in 2009.

Middle management only wants Material Design 3, to show that we are on the cutting edge.

The dev tools getting better over time has meant that it’s easier for us to make interfaces that can accommodate a lot of different screen sizes and zoom levels and accessibility stuff. But all those varieties of screen sizes means it’s very difficult to make those nice pixel-perfect interfaces and still work on most devices.

And that’s not even taking into consideration the project manager yelling “FASTER FASTER FASTER” all day. A lot of us would love to return to hand-crafted interface design and take our time to make nice things. But software moved out of the nerd space and just became another place for the MBA’s to colonize. Now it’s all KPI’s and standups and soulless flat minimum viable products that never get improved.

I prefer the UI here to the one in the post several times over.

One day I well get through the dark web of dependencies needed for the visualization thing for my PiCorePlayer.

He's right though

Yeah. I remember it getting released and people hating it compared to the old one

You could totally replicate that winamp interface with vector graphics. You'd only have to maintain the same aspect ratio

All you need to do to make something scalable is to design it with vector art rather than bitmaps. Even with variable resolutions, you can still make something look nice.

No, the real kicker is that nearly every 'app' these days is secretly a webpage, complete with everything that entails, pro or con.

WACUP can. Don't ask me what else it can do besides DPI scaling, the dev can't bother listing new features anywhere besides a mess of changelogs. It's a Winamp mod update...thing.

https://getwacup.com/

Aha I was just thinking that it's clearly inspired by the silver blue bubble design language Sony used to use.

I do note that it does feel like the flat material design language that still permeates a lot of digital design has been around for far longer than pre 2010 styles.

Only now after what feels like 15 years are gradients coming back. Still not really anything interesting.

looks better than anything made by big tech in the last 10 years

Then download a different skin!