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• Winamp and the March of GUI

  1er juillet 2012, par Multimedia Mike — General, ars technica, gui, user interface, winamp

  Ars Technica recently published a 15-year retrospective on the venerable Winamp multimedia player, prompting bouts of nostalgia and revelations of "Huh ? That program is still around ?" from many readers. I was among them.

  
  
  

  I remember first using Winamp in 1997. I remember finding a few of these new files called MP3s online and being able to play the first 20 seconds using the official Fraunhofer Windows player— full playback required the fully licensed version. Then I searched for another player and came up with Winamp. The first version I ever used was v1.05 in the summer of 1997. I remember checking the website often for updates and trying out every single one. I can’t imagine doing that nowadays— programs need to auto-update themselves (which Winamp probably does now ; I can’t recall the last time I used the program).

  Video Underdog
  The last time Winamp came up on my radar was early in 2003 when a new version came with support for a custom, proprietary multimedia audio/video format called Nullsoft Video (NSV). I remember the timeframe because the date is indicated in the earliest revision of my NSV spec document (back when I was maintaining such docs in a series of plaintext files). This was cobbled together from details I and others in the open source multimedia community sorted out from sample files. It was missing quite a few details, though.

  Then, Winamp founder Justin Frankel — introduced through a colleague on the xine team — emailed me his official NSV format and told me I was free to incorporate details into my document just as long as it wasn’t obvious that I had the official spec. This put me in an obnoxious position of trying to incorporate details which would have been very difficult to reverse engineer without the official doc. I think I coped with the situation by never really getting around to updating my doc in any meaningful way. Then, one day, the official spec was released to the world anyway, and it is now mirrored here at multimedia.cx.

  I don’t think the format ever really caught on in any meaningful way, so not a big deal. (Anytime I say that about a format, I always learn it saw huge adoption is some small but vocal community.)

  What’s Wrong With This Picture ?
  What I really wanted to discuss in this post was the matter of graphical user interfaces and how they have changed in the last 15 years.
  
  I still remember when I first downloaded Winamp v1.05 and tried it on my Windows machine at the time. Indignantly, the first thought I had was, "What makes this program think it’s so special that it’s allowed to violate the user interface conventions put forth by the rest of the desktop ?" All of the Windows programs followed a standard set of user interface patterns and had a consistent look and feel... and then Winamp came along and felt it could violate all those conventions.

  I guess I let the program get away with it because it was either that or only play 20-second clips from the unregistered Fraunhofer player. Though incredibly sterile by comparison, the Fraunhofer player, it should be noted, followed Windows UI guidelines to the letter.

  As the summer of 1997 progressed and more Winamp versions were released, eventually one came out (I think it was v1.6 or so) that supported skins. I was excited because there was a skin that made the program look like a proper Windows program— at least if you used the default Windows color scheme, and had all of your fonts a certain type and size.

  Skins were implemented by packaging together a set of BMP images to overlay on various UI elements. I immediately saw a number of shortcomings with this skinning approach. A big one was UI lock-in. Ironically, if you skin an app and wish to maintain backwards compatibility with the thousands of skins selflessly authored by your vibrant community (seriously, I couldn’t believe how prolific these things were), then you were effectively locked into the primary UI. Forget about adding a new button anywhere.

  Another big problem was resolution-independence. Basing your UI on static bitmaps doesn’t scale well with various resolutions. Winamp had its normal mode and it also had double-sized mode.

  Skins proliferated among many types of programs in the late 1990s. I always treasured this Suck.com (remember them ? that’s a whole other nostalgia trip) essay from April, 2000 entitled Skin Cancer. Still, Winamp was basically the standard, and the best, and I put away my righteous nerd rage and even dug through the vast troves of skins. I remember settling on Swankamp for a good part of 1998, probably due to the neo-swing revival at the time.

  
  
  

  Then again, if Winamp irked me, imagine my reaction when I was first exposed to the Sonique Music Player in 1998 :

  
  
  

  The New UI Order
  Upon reflection, I realize now that I had a really myopic view of what a computer GUI should be. I thought the GUIs were necessarily supposed to follow the WIMP (windows, icons, mouse, pointer) paradigm and couldn’t conceive of anything different. For a long time, I couldn’t envision a useful GUI on a small device (like a phone) because WIMP didn’t fit well on such a small interface (even though I saw various ill-fated attempts to make it work). This thinking seriously crippled me when I was trying to craft a GUI for a custom console media player I was developing as a hobby many years ago.

  I’m looking around at what I have open on my Windows 7 desktop right now. Google Chrome browser, Apple iTunes, Adobe Photoshop Elements, and VMware Player are 4 programs which all seem to have their own skins. Maybe Winamp doesn’t look so out of place these days.

• MAINTAINERS : Mark parts from Robert as unmaintained

  31 août 2024, par Michael Niedermayer

  MAINTAINERS : Mark parts from Robert as unmaintained
  Last mail and commit from Robert seems from 2011, thats 13 years ago
  CC : Rob <robert.swain@gmail.com>
  
  Signed-off-by : Michael Niedermayer <michael@niedermayer.cc>
  

  • [DH] MAINTAINERS

• Death of A Micro Center

  21 septembre 2012, par Multimedia Mike — History

  The Micro Center computer store located in Santa Clara, CA, USA closed recently :

  
  
  

  I liked Micro Center. I have liked Micro Center ever since I first visited their Denver, CO location 10 years ago. I would sometimes drive an hour in each direction just to visit that shop. I was excited to see that they had a location in the Bay Area when I moved here a few years ago (despite the preponderance of Fry’s stores).

  Now this location is gone. I wonder how much of the “we couldn’t come to favorable terms on a lease” was true (vs. an excuse to close a retail store at a time when more business is moving online, particularly in the heart of Silicon Valley). But that’s not what I wanted to discuss. I came here to discuss…

  The Micro Center Window Logos

  The craziest part about shopping the Santa Clara Micro Center location was the logos they displayed on the window outside. Every time I saw it, it made me sentimental for a time when some of these logos were current, or when some of these companies were still in business. Some of the logos on their front window were for companies I’ve never heard of. It reminds me of the nearby 7-11 convenience stores when I was growing up– their walls were decorated with people sporting embarrassingly 1970s styles long after the 1970s had transpired.

  I thought I would record what those front window logos were and try to pinpoint when the store launched exactly (assuming the logos have been their since the initial opening and never changed).

  
  
  Click for larger image
  

  Here we have Lotus, Hewlett Packard/HP, Corel, Fuji, Power Macintosh, NEC, and Fujitsu. Lotus was purchased by IBM in 1995 and still seems to be maintained as a separate brand. The Power Macintosh was introduced as a brand in 1994. Corel’s logo has seen a few mutations over the years but I don’t know when this one fell out of favor.

  Fuji (vs. Fujitsu) appears to refer to Fujifilm, though this logo is also obsolete.

  
  
  Click for larger image
  

  Hayes– I specifically remember reading the Slashdot post accouncing that Hayes is dead (followed by many comments reminiscing about the Hayes command set). Here is the post, from early 1999.

  From Googling, it doesn’t appear IBM still has a presence in the consumer computing space (though they do have something pertaining to software for consumer products). Then there’s the good old rainbow Apple logo, something that went away in 1997. I suspect 1997 was also the last hurrah of the name ‘Macintosh’ (though I remember mistakenly referring to Apple computer products as Macintoshes well into the mid-2000s and inadvertently angering some Apple enthusiasts).

  
  
  Click for larger image
  

  As for the next segment, obviously, both Sony and Toshiba are still very much alive. Iomega was acquired by EMC in 2008 but is still maintained as a separate brand. USRobotics is still around and making — what else ? — 56K modems (and their current logo is slightly different than the one seen here).

  Targus seems to be a case maker (“Leading Provider of Cases, Bags and Accessories for Laptops and Tablets”). I wonder if that’s just their current business or if they had more areas long ago ? It seems strange that they would get brand billing like this.

  Finally, searching for information about Practical Peripherals only produces sites about how they’re long dead (like this history lesson). It’s unclear when they died.

  The interior of this store was also decorated with more technology company logos near the ceiling (I didn’t really register that fact until I had visited many times). Regrettably, I now won’t be able to see how up to date those logos were.

  Based on the data points above, it’s safe to conclude that the store opened between 1995 or 1996 (again, assuming the logos were placed at opening and never changed).

  Epilogue

  Here’s one more curious item still visible from the outside :

  
  
  

  “See the world’s fastest PC !” Featuring an Intel Core 2 Extreme ? That CPU dates back to 2007 and was succeeded by Nehalem in late 2008. So even that sign, which is presumably easier and cleaner to replace than the window logos, was absurdly out of date.