LOL! Now isn't that standard MS? Like I always say - if in doubt, I.B.M. (I Blame Microsoft). Can't go too far wrong with that.

Also, this fiasco just confirms me in sticking with Winsows 10 and not going with 11. I'll continue that way for as long as I still have to use Windows occasionally or support of Enterprise edition stops which won't be for another 10 years. And who knows if I'll still be around then, or for that matter, any of us. If the climate catastrophe won't do for us, then that lunatic, narcissist 'baby' just may. Booooooom!

@NEXTER - life would be easier with fixing issues if the source of an issue was more forthcoming. Developers, creators and service people could do a much better job of staying on top of things.

We live in the century of zero accountability. People are afraid of owning a problem for fear of litigation. There was a time where the manager of anything had the buck stop there and never blamed their staff even if they were responsible. Now managers blame their staff to keep their jobs. So a problem takes longer to be either identified or fixed because nobody wants to own it FFS.

@JORGE

That was a wonderful and encouraging post for everyone who likes to skin Winstep and the people who like Winstep.

You mentioned a public site.
May I kindly make a suggestion with your intent of a public site for people to download Winstep skins?

1. Keep the existing registered Winstep users gallery as is but...
2. YOU pick themes you want to promote the beauty and advantages from a variety of skinners, only for the public site.

You should have the control not anyone else, it's your baby. It's encouraging to all of us that you like what everyone does but you should pick a variety from multiple skinners with some kind of message "Register with our forum and userbase and have access to 100s of more themes in our user gallery."

This way Picco14, me, Nexter and anyone else skinning can put their themes in the gallery. You can choose any extras you wish to add from there.

@BassdudeNZ - Indeed.

Absolutely. It's never anyone's fault. Except, people always want to blame somebody, so somebody's got to be at fault even if nobody is! "May car crashed and I got badly injured. It's the car maker's fault, they're to blame." "Never mind that I'm a crap driver, it's their responsibility to make sure I'm safe." That's today's mentality, alas. A really prominent thing is, parents always want to blame the school/the teachers/whatever for everything, expecting the teachers to bring up their sodding kids for them! Oh no, it's not my/our fault my/our brat is a spoiled rotten hooligan and thug, it's the school's fault! I don't have time to bring up my kids, that's what school is for. That sort of shite attitude prevails nowadays. And parents don't want to accept that their bad parents without a clue how to bring up their brats properly, so diagnoses like ADHD, Aspergers, and "autism spectrum" are invented/abused. Hell, ADHD doesn't even exist - the doc who defined it acknowledged that and only invented it to avoid telling parents the truth, wanting a quiet life!

@BassdudeNZ - Please leave me out of it - my themes are my own and are not going to be shared at all. Not ever. In any case, there would be copyright and related issues involved. And in the first place, I wouldn't share them because I object to people messing up my creation. Not a chance.

There's a nice theme someone else did I like and kept called "Garden". Unfortunately, there is one part that has bugged me being that the buttons never seemed to align. I cannot put it up and it is not the creator's fault. It was created on an older version of Winstep. I know this because it works fine in that version (in a VM running XPSP2). I found by changing the vertical alignment from -6 to -4 fixed the viewing annoyance I was experiencing. I should go a pixel or two farther but decided I can live with it.Any further and it would likely affect older Winstep users if any decide to try it.
Out of respect for whoever the skinner is I cannot upload because it is their theme and not their fault as it works fine in 9.5 as it was created sometime around then, but a simple edit in the *.wst file fixed it for newer Winstep users. I cannot offer more than that from respect as mentioned.

Existing in v25.9



Minor edit

@NEXTER - yes, they are your themes and absolutely, your right.
It was not my intention to offend you only to pay the respect due to your Graphic arts abilities.
Out of interest, how would you know if someone messed with it unless they uploaded it somewhere? I get that you simply figure if that door is not opened nobody can walk through it to start with?

@BassdudeNZ - oh no, no offense taken. It's not only modifying and passing it off as own work that I meant, but most of all also just the ability of any user to mod themes willy nilly, with things like colourisation and lots more besides. IMO themes ought to be set in stone as it were, completely immutable. They may well not all be art or whatever, but they're somebody's creation and therefore deserving of protection. It's just plain wrong that anyone can f*** around with a theme as they please. People should have the choice to like a theme or lump it and find a different one. That's enough choice.

Look at the mess that the whole consumerist society is in - far, far too much choice at every turn. Not a good thing, ever.

@NEXTER - in this day and age with the new technology, it is quite incredible that nobody has made a graphic program that makes graphics that cannot be edited except in the originating source.
In music they actually did. SONY created an anti-copyright copying and digital conversion algorithm. It would have taken off except they put it on CD's and told nobody and were sued for privacy infringement law breaches. If they told people first it may have been the norm.

Longer one...

As someone once said, getting old is a blessing. Some background for anyone who is interested in my M.O. as an amateur skinner, because I have made way too many posts already and will be backing off now. I may even disappear again. I have not decided but I have an entire album of music to do which will occupy a lot of my time starting next month running into February 2026.

The issue with reading anything written is you cannot see the face of the person writing it, so with age, I learned that while in person, first impressions count, with the Internet written word, they do not, quite the opposite. There are so many misinterpretations online, I decided not to add to them and assume people on this forum and others I trust the community in, have nothing but good intentions. Anyone can crap on someone else, that is easy, but I found with age that a little encouragement goes a very long way.
There is constructive and destructive and they are polar opposites. Proactive beats reactive every time. The world is in a reactive state, I simply choose to avoid adding to the negatives. That is easy. I have maybe 15 years left in my life if I am lucky so I decided to surround myself with as much good Karma as possible. So if I am unsure, I walk away and re-read it later.

UPLOADED:

Using the Xtreme context menu that is now available courtesy of the beta I installed for no known explicable reason(s). I may do one or two before Christmas.

RESPONSE TO ZIP FILES being included after checking every single created theme in its original form, all 49 of them:

On one computer the creating one, I checked because people kept saying I have zip files inside zip files. I checked that is 100% completely and totally wrong. There is not one single zip file inside ANY theme I create. I let you all go and waited until I could be 100% sure. Whether it created because I zipped them incorrectly, renamed the zip to xtreme incorrectly instead of the context menu, I have no idea, but I have zero zip files inside any theme and it is very easy to prove that. I wore it and took you all at your word, but you're all wrong. It is an error on the pre-uploading stage not at the creation stage.

I also checked Steampunk Air theme. Nah I am very happy with it exactly as it is. We all do things for our own reasons and I accepted that a very long time ago. Mine are experimentation. I also figure if someone likes or dislikes something that is the beauty of individualism. No offence intended or slight on my or anyone else's abilities, nor perspectives denied, just personal choice which is my right with the themes I create.
If someone likes it they'll use it. If they don't, they won't.

As you all were. Cheers.

Yeah, well it wasn't a clever idea and really pissed off a lot of people. Myself included. CDs are even more perishable than good old vinyl - so prone to 'bit loss' to begin with! I have a heap of CDs from the last nearly 40 years to prove it! So I've always backed up CDs I really liked by copying to HDD in 48 or 96 bit wav form.

As for immutable GFX, that would be more of a PITA than actually useful. But, for online use they can always be hard-coded into a website or whatever. So, e.g., themes or skins for programmes like the Winstep ones, the themes could actually be hard-coded into the app/s, but it would need regular updating and be a PITA for everyone. But in terms of website GFX that would work well enough, or where you have a limited number of themes fixed with an app or even OS.

Appropriately, my last for a while.

I'll put up sometime before the event. It's busy graphically, but then again most people's Christmases are. No feedback needed nor wanted.
Ciao bella.

?! Hah bumhug! Err, Bah humbug! I'm definitely with Scrooge.

The "Merry Christmas" theme is there for anyone who wants it. Changed from the 2nd draft above:
1. changed colour of bg in Workshelf
2. Made Active TAB a brighter red
3. Redid the wallpaper background in Bryce 3D as it has an abundance of trees. If you look closely, many of the pine trees are identical I simply resized many of them in the 3D field. Anyone who knows anything about trees, no two trees are identical. I also cheated a little. The advantage in 3D is the stretching - some of them also look different but they actually are only wider or shorter Some call it clever, I call it cheating, or if I want to be kinder to myself, smarter, not harder. If I get bored over Xmas, I may export as *.obj and redo in 3DS. I was impatient as I have begun practicing for a large project...
4. Added nice cozy glossy plastic style (like the rest) cottage, with the Christmas turkey to indicate Christmas dinner.
5. tested on Laptop and Ultra-widescreen.
6. for a change wallpaper will not work well on 5120x1440, modules and menus are just fine. wallpaper looks like crap to me on Ultra. Bryce 3d is great for objects and many things. High resolution I have not found to be one of them. Those with Ultra-widescreen will need to find their own, though the wallpaper in the images is included.
7. Changed sub-menu, has a little bit of snow in it and not so stark, a little darker.

Cheers and as the theme says...

Argh! Sorry, can't like it at all. It's as yucky as the damned thing itself. Definitely bah humbug AFAIC. I mean, it's really just a plastic consumer fest, all about having the biggest Christmas Do and meal/booze, the biggest lights and decorations, and above all, the biggest, most expensive gifts. Completely plastic, which makes your theme quite appropriate and fitting in a way, @BassdudeNZ. It's not even got the slightest thing to do with religion anymore. Which is perhaps quite appropriate in a way, in that it only was created by the early Roman church to get people's attention away from the so-called "pagan" Germanic feast of Yule, which the Roman church promptly partly incorporated.

Yule, celebrated throughout the Germanic world and beyond, was the feast of the winter solstice and was an occasion to have one last great feast with mead, ale, or even cider - depending on your standing and wealth - before the coming lean times leading up to the renewal of the feast of Eostre, the arrival of spring - also promptly subsumed by the church as "Easter". The local Lord would reward his loyal followers with Yule's rich meals and lots of mead and ale, as well as gold or silver, or weapons, and sacrifice his best livestock to Woden or/and Thunar (to use the Anglo-Saxon/Old English names), Othinnr and Thorr respectively in Old Norse. A big 'log' - usually, the stump of a felled tree - would be burning on the hearth of the Lord's feasting hall for the duration of the festivities, around two weeks. That's the origin of the 'Yule Log', of course. An altogether jollier affair, I think. Should be revived.