Minimal
stressed for motivation and achievement2006-02-23
Theming
I’ve always had difficulty having reasoned debates with managers and marketing departments that wanted “skinned” or themed desktop applications. All too often, theming was seen as the primary way to brand the software, almost ignoring the branding that came from the name, the logo, the website, the parent company, the adverts and so on. This, IMHO, was folly.
While a certain degree of branding can be achieved in the UI, subtlety is rarely the order of the day. The result is an application whose look and feel gets in the way of the user’s everyday work and/or a maintenance headache for the developers. In fact, I wish my current employers (who shall remain nameless) could see this too. I’ve already wasted weeks getting our themed custom controls to do what I want.
Maybe I should just point them in the direction of Microsoft’s latest advice on theming? For me, it’s great to see some degree of balance in a discussion of the topic.
Just because you can change how something looks doesn't mean you should. People are used to the Windows UI looking the way it does out of the box and they have a lot of intuition about how it works purely from its appearance.
Personally, I use the Winamp Modern skin on Winamp because nobody else understands the app the way the Winamp team do, so no other skin has such good *functionality*, even if some may look prettier in screenshots.
It winds me up when things like QuickTime and iTunes try to impose an Apple style onto Windows. It winds me up even more when a tool like Blinx copies that imposed style and imposes a half-arsed version of it!
Microsoft spend a heck of a lot more time and money on studying UI and how it applies to Windows than probably everybody else put together. It doesn't mean they're always right but it means you've got to have a damn good reason to change something.
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