Membership, which is free, entitles you to upload skins and post messages: 'It sucks and I'm tired,' complains one member in response to Chris Carey's Winamp skin YummiYogurt. Cofounded last year by Damian Hodgkiss, Chad Boyda, and Bryan Beretta as a place to show off their creations, quickly evolved into a gallery and town hall for skinners. Skinners distribute their wares through sites like, , DeskMod, and, the undisputed leader. 'By customizing something that's important to you, you make the world your own.' 'People get attached to their computers,' he continues. Unlike cosmetic skins made by graphic artists, functional skins are created by coders.Īt its most baroque, skinning weds customized functions with a unified look that spans the operating system and several applications - 'like a sci-fi movie you live in,' in the words of Ian Lyman, one of the cocreators of the skinnable Sonique music player. If a program is made up of several interdependent files, you can swap them for customized versions that add new features. Just as a cosmetic skin replaces a program's stock graphics, a functional skin can replace its stock code modules. But skinning is moving rapidly from form to function.
