Theme "Winstep Software Technologies" made from the site "Winstep" for myself and for fun with Xion Player skins and Rainmeter skins "Disks, Google, Notes, Woofer, Gallery and iRadios"...

If other people feel like presenting screenshots of themes, do not hesitate, go for it...

Well designed, Picco! Looking good at full size. Also, really well done with the Rainmeter stuff, can't have been easy to get the GFX to match the rest. But, at a time when people are getting more and more concerned about online privacy and security, should they really be 'encouraged' to use anything Google?

nexter, you wrote:
"can't have been easy to get the GFX to match the rest."

I don't understand what you mean by GFX, I didn't have any problems like that, can you explain...
All themes work in 1920 x 1080 and 2560 x 1440 without any problem...

You also wrote:
"But, at a time when people are getting more and more concerned about online privacy and security, should they really be 'encouraged' to use anything Google?"

The Google rainmeter skin is not the problem, I could have programmed it on DuckDuckgo in the .ini file or another search engine to please you...

90 views and probably more and no follow-up except yours.
I actually see that Winstep themes don't interest anyone, not even their designer who deigns to answer my few minor questions even on the Wincustomize site. I'm starting to think that I'm being rejected, for what reasons, I don't know...

At my age, I've had enough, I'll continue to make Winstep themes because I like it and to take the license, but I won't intervene anymore on the Winstep forum which doesn't inspire a haven of peace to me...
I'm bowing out...
Sincerely...
Picco14.

GFX = graphics. I meant, transforming the theme GFX into SVG format (vector GFX) which Rainmeter uses, or can it use raster (bitmap) GFX now?

I meant I viewed it at max magnification on the page, which looks good, though with my eyesight, I would have preferred a larger taskbar. Personally, I make my themes 4K (and even 8K) - scaling down usually gives better results than scaling up.

Picco, you seem to be getting somewhat uptight here. Relax a bit, take things easy - been complimenting you.

It's not about pleasing me. It's just that more and more people are 'de-googling' their internet use, or wanting to do so. More and more people put a value on their privacy and security online now and are trying to get away from anything 'Big Tech' that rapes their privacy. So perhaps, yes, DDG or Startpage might have been more diplomatic.

Aw, come on Picco, I'm sure it's not like that. We do see people asking about new themes here, and about theming, etc., and there's still interest there. Just not as much as there used to be a long time ago now. And as for Jorge, I'd take his not replying as meaning, roughly, probably, "not happening". (There are far too many options for theming anims etc. already anyway, IMO.) Besides, Jorge's pretty pre-occupied lately with all sorts, e.g. in addition to updates there's a major issue concerning the forum and the website - a few months ago, a certain far eastern nation suddenly, explosively discovered Winstep and free Nexus. (That's why guest numbers in the forums have gone up on average more than double!) And by now there possibly are as many free Nexus users there as in the rest of the world put together! Not a pretty picture in terms of bandwidth use. Paying for more bandwidth simply isn't an option, wouldn't make sense. Anyway, Jorge's dealing with that problem also.

Times have long changed Picco, not just that theming/skinning is nearly as dead as a Dodo apart from Winstep and a couple of other apps (the only decent one of the latter being Rainmeter IMO), but also forums have changed and been in decline. People's online behaviour/interactions have changed - not for the better I think - and shifted to so-called social media (that are anything but social!). It's become pretty rare to see an old regular logging in here, alas, much less take an active part in any potential discussions. It's sad, but it is what it is. I often try my best to promote and even 'provoke' discussion but alas, rarely to any effect.

Don't take it personally, the Winstep forums were never a place to share themes as, unlike at Wincustomize, most users only come here to solve technical issues.

Picco, you also completely ignored my requests when I asked you multiple times to please upload your themes to the Winstep Themes Gallery (which is not yet publicly available in case anyone is wondering) so they would not be lost forever if Stardock decided, for whatever reason, to delete the Winstep category from Wincustomize.

As I told you at the time you would have retained full control over them because the Winstep gallery uses the same user accounts as the forums (and despite currently being pretty basic, it also supports user comments as well as user ratings).

Anyway, as Nexter stated, that is not the reason I didn't reply, you just caught me at a bad time - and some of your questions required digging deeper into the software (and some old code) to answer.

Hello to you and thank you for your feedback...

Rest assured, I do not take it personally and I am not tense at all, I am completely relaxed...
You have experience especially "Nexter" to be a moderator on several forums, he practices every day...
We bait the client, we increase the tension a little with words to make him react and the result is not long in coming...
Now retired, but with 40 years in the police, it helps...

To answer "Nexter", since the time I have been dissecting and building Rainmeter skins I have not seen SVG vectors but only bitmap.png with transparency.
For the 40 pixel larger taskbar and the scale everything is consistent with all Winstep themes built by the most famous skinners in 1920 x 1080. Sure, they work in 2K, but everything is reduced and the desktop ends up with lots of empty surfaces, I don't like that, I like to see a full desktop.
I have two 27-inch screens in 2560 x 1440 (2K) that I can't stand when I do office automation or themes, it's too small I can't read and see what I'm doing even with my glasses, it breaks my eyes, I configure them in 1920 x 1080. I only switch to 2K for games.
To answer "Jorge", I understand for the Winstep gallery, I consulted it and on the quantity of themes present I noticed a lot of downloads but only 7 comments, it's very few.

Making a Winstep theme requires time and patience and after presenting it for download any skinner appreciates having a positive or negative feedback it doesn't matter, it makes progress and it reassures in the work accomplished. People download everything without comments and don't care much about the work done, not all but a large majority, it's frustrating but it passes...
Also, I haven't put any themes even on Wincustomize for several months, just a few screenshots, some complain about it, but it goes over my leg.
I don't care if the themes I made are definitely lost or not, I make themes for my personal pleasure, that's enough for me and I've gotten over all that...
That's all for today...
Thanks again, with all my respect to both of you...

You mean the "good cop, bad cop" routine? lol I assure you it is not deliberate, it is just our true natures. Nexter is a lot tougher than I am or even like him to be at times, but he has also been an invaluable help to run the forums when I am not around, and I am grateful to him for that.

But, with you being a retired policeman, I understand why you would think otherwise.



The Winstep gallery is NOT publicly available yet, i.e.; the vast majority of users don't know about it or how to access it, there are no links to it on the website, not sure why would you expect lots of user comments and downloads (in fact I don't even know what you mean by "lots of downloads" ? )



See, that is where you and I completely diverge. In fact, as a creative person myself, it deeply saddens me to see a fellow creator not caring whether his work is lost forever or not.

Personally, one of the things that motivates me the most is seeing other people enjoy the work that I do and finding it useful just for the sake of it. Also being able to make a living from the very thing I love to do is the cherry on top of the cake, of course.

Over time I have seen some amazing themes and works of art being lost forever as sites go down: first when Skinz.org closed back in 2001 or so (which is what prompted Stardock to create Wincustomize), then, more recently, when the two people behind PunkSoftware's RocketDock closed the RocketDock gallery (as at that point it was just a drain on their bandwidth). I even offered to host it, but they chose not to accept it.

The Skinz.org admin (Shoggot) back then allowed me to download by FTP the hundreds of Winstep NextSTART themes available at the site (I still have them), but there was nothing I could do with them since I did not have authorization from the skin authors themselves.

Besides not wanting to be 100% dependent on a 3rd party site such as Stardock's Wincustomize for Winstep themes (as all the other skin sites have been dying one by one), this is one of major reasons why I wanted to have a Winstep Themes Gallery, so something like that does not happen again. It's kind of a "backup themes repository" where authors still retain full control over their themes - why do you think I haven't made it public yet?

Anyway, it is a pity you just don't care, as I like your themes very much and so do many others.

No, not at all, that's where you're wrong, when you work as a police officer, you're not in the caricature of a detective novel or a TV series "good cop, bad cop", it's not fiction. You're dealing with extremely Machiavellian and sometimes very intelligent people who will do anything to get out of their situation with a very heavy criminal past on their backs that I'm not going to describe here. You have to use a lot of patience, cunning and psychology to unravel the case and obtain confessions, it's very tiring but rewarding when you get to the end and you can bring justice to the victims (the goal, the most important, justice to the victims and not make others)...
See for yourself the good side of things, a simple little post led to all this discussion which has the merit of better understanding everyone's ideas without any animosity. I have the deepest respect for your work, surely you are a good person as well as "Nexter" who is sometimes a little hard but who is in his role as moderator (the English man on all floors).

You say, I quote:

"Personally, one of the things that motivates me the most is to see other people appreciate the work I do and find it useful just for fun. Being able to live from what I like to do is also the icing on the cake, of course."
For me, it's quite the opposite, I am a volunteer, I do not live from the themes that I build, I offer them for free, it is normal to have feedback and to know at least if what I have produced is appreciated, if there is no feedback demotivation sets in and you no longer want to continue, depression.
Don't worry, I'm not there yet, it's quite the opposite, I'm enjoying my retirement very well and I feel good about myself even if life sometimes inflicts bad times on us, we often have to bounce back.

You see, somewhere, we want the same thing...
Sincerily...
Picco14.

Yes, I completely understand the need for feedback, but unless I am missing something, this still doesn't explain why you decided NOT to upload your existing themes to the (still NOT open to the general public) Winstep Themes Gallery.

I feel like I am beating a dead horse here, but care to explain better?

I have no idea why you would think my role as a moderator would be remotely relevant here, my posts in this thread were entirely complimentary to you and posted without my mod hat on - there was nothing to moderate in the first place.

Ah well, ex-cop explains a lot Picco...

Well, Rainmeter obviously must have changed a lot since I last looked. I still have an old version installed somewhere in Windows and 2 or 3 themes, and then it was all vector based.

Even 2K is pretty small when more and more people use 4K (and some even 8K) monitors.

You must spend an awful lot of time looking at your desktop if you want to see it full! I prefer it to be as empty as possible and not distracting - including a non-distracting wallpaper - and instead want to concentrate on what I'm doing in apps. But to each his own.

Huh? Last time I looked there were some downloads, but certainly not a lot. Very few people would know where to go anyway. If you're theming for the comments you need to examine your motivation - it shouldn't be about 'ego massage'.

Well, I don't suffer fools, gladly or otherwise, never have, and yeah, I guess that I may sometimes seem a bit hard to some as a moderator, when acting as such.

I'm not sure what makes you assume I'm an Englishman, I might just as well be Scottish, Welsh or Irish, or even just plain British. However, I'm happy enough...

"Nexter", je vous sens tendu, relaxe...
C'est quoi cet esprit sarcastique, vous avez un problème avec les policiers ou ex-policiers...
Ah bon, l'ex-flic explique beaucoup de Picco...
Qu'est-ce que vous entendez par là...
"Massage de l'ego", n'importe quoi...
Quand "Jorge" déclare :
« Personnellement, l’une des choses qui me motive le plus, c’est de voir les autres apprécier le travail que je fais et le trouver utile juste pour le plaisir. Pouvoir vivre de ce que j’aime faire, c’est aussi la cerise sur le gâteau, bien sûr".
Si c'est pas manifester un certain égo, alors c'est quoi..?
Quand à votre rôle de modérateur, je n'ai pas prétendu que vous le pratiquiez dans ce post, je voulais dire en régle générale lorsques une personne dépasse les bornes, vous prévenez séchement et si la personne persiste, vous sanctionnez. (C'était seulement une image), ce qui me parait tout à fait normal.
Mon bureau, parlons-en, il est comme le votre, complétement vide au quotidien, aucune icône, aucun dock, juste un fond d'écran, la barre des tâches et la poubelle. Faire un thème complet pour winstep, c'est juste pour le plaisir. Une fois terminé, je quitte winstep et je repasse à ma configuration minimale sous Windows. Par la suite, par inspiration j'entreprends de refaire un thème et ainsi de suite. Je n'utilise jamais au quotidien winstep ou nexus, c'est juste le plaisir de faire des thèmes.
Après, la phrase "L'homme Anglais à tout les étages", c'était pas méchant du tout, c'était plutôt un compliment et une supposition par rapport à tout les commentaires que vous avez faits sur ce forum, car oui je consulte régulièrement les différents posts sur ce forum.
et alors que vous soyez anglais, britannique, écossais, gallois ou irlandais, peut importe. Elles sont toutes des nations tout à fait respectables...
J’ai l’impression de battre des chevaux aveugles ici, vous intervenez sur des détails de mes posts mais vous ne cherchez pas à analyser tout le contenu...

Oh dear, that shows you how easy it is to misunderstand things or misinterpret them when people don't speak the same native language. Things may translate, yet, in translation, lose their intended meaning quite easily because of differences in the way each language conveys meaning. So Picco dear chap, I'm sorry if I 'misread' your posts - neither of us really is at fault, these things happen.

I used my limited understanding of French (I once learnt and spoke it when young and read some of your great literature and philosophers in the original, but apart from perhaps a handful of phrases I now remember very little of the language, just as I remember next to nothing of most of the languages I had learned in the now distant past) in combination with a reasonable machine translation of your last post and realised what had happened. I realise that French people and their language are much more emotional than British people and the English language - Vive la différance!

And I take your compliments in the spirit they were made.

Just a brief comment regarding creative motivation. I come from professional backgrounds in the arts. So personally speaking, my motivation has always been, well, a compulsion to do what I did and still do, the absolute need to do it. If others 'got it', understood what I did, great, if they didn't, tough titties, it didn't and still doesn't matter to me. In other words, I never have and still don't do things for acclaim - nor just for financial gain - but simply because I absolutely must do them. 'L'obsession magnifique', I guess one could say. C'est le vis - pardonnez mois mon Anglais, as you say in French.

Bon nuit Picco. "The Englishman on all floors."

Hi Picco14. First time I've seen you on this site. Your comment made me wonder. Have you checked to see if you have cataracts? Your problem sounds familiar. I've never worn glasses, but for a couple of years, I was on the cusp of being legally blind. At first, I thought my sunglasses were dirty, but then I saw that the coating had worn off. I later found out that wasn't the problem. Soon after I failed the eye test for my driver's license. The person asked me to read line 5. I didn't see a line 5!

I had to go to an eye doctor. I went to one at a local Walmart who prescribed glasses for driving and told me that my optical nerves were damaged. I almost died about 6 years ago from diabetes which damaged my kidneys and presumably damaged my optical nerves. The glasses didn't help. It did allow me to retain my driver's license.

Each day my vision was getting worse. After a year and a half, I followed the advice of a friend and went to a local popular eye entity that does surgery. The doctor told me there was nothing wrong with my optical nerves, and I had cataracts! I was misdiagnosed! I was running around all that time thinking nothing could be done to correct my vision.

The Dr. removed my lens and put new artificial ones in and the result was incredible! Everything was in ultra HD! The process took about 45 days to complete. Both eyes cannot be done at the same time. It's been about a year since the eye surgery.

I hope your eye situation can be remedied which should aid you in making your themes.

Hi Picco14, its good to see you on here.

When I first started using Winstep (a few years ago) I was looking for a minimalist theme that had the least impact on desktop real estate. I wanted a plain desktop without lots of distracting graphics; with thin (but clear) menus on workshelves; narrow taskbar; and a simple but distinct Start menu. I realise thats not what most people want to see from skins - but thats me, thats how I prefer to work.

I couldn't find anything that suited my requirement so started looking at how to build my own - to find that this is a poorly documented process!

I remember coming across your themes on wincustomize (indeed I seem to recall that there was really only you and Halo296 that were active) and was impressed with the capabilities displayed.

However, what impressed me more was the time and effort that must have gone in to working out how to create the themes, and particularly, how to implement these in Winstep.

I eventually managed to cobble something workable together from a combination of themes, and some basic file configuration - but it was never ideal. There were some bits that didn't work as expected, but like you I couldn't get any answers as to why or how it should be done.

Similar to yourself I am retired and now doing things for fun / enjoyment, and continuing to tweak Winstep was not one of those things (for me).

If you were ever to document how to build themes in Winstep I would be interested in discussing this, but appreciate that may not be how you want to spend your time.

I seem to recall that Nexter did raise a question / poll on the forum some time back to see what interest there was in having a forum for theming, but got little interest.

Anyway enjoy your retirement, and keep up the good work!