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Comment by basch | Hacker News Reader

I always get a kick out of how modern design has decided to finally coalesced on a hybrid of Watercolor XP and Encarta 2000. Microsoft could have just stick with that and saved 2 decades of redesigns, but then XP/OSX came out with everything covered in shiny plastic. Oh Luna/Aqua how you set us back. The lost decades.

http://www.intelliadmin.com/index.php/2007/04/forgotten-wind...

http://www.shoplack.com/detail.aspx?id=1305

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It really is remarkable how far ahead of it's time Watercolor really was, and then they just killed it.

In an alternate timeline, they used watercolor and now XP-style guis are in fashion.

If they had a consistent gray/white/tan everywhere, and modern icons, it would look en vogue today.

https://www.deviantart.com/rainingskies/art/Windows-Whistler...

Imagine that with these, something they absolutely could have accomplished at the time. https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/20/21146028/microsoft-window...

Watercolor was my favorite XP theme! I would never have remembered it if not for seeing it mentioned here. I used to find it elegant compared to other themes.

On the Linux side, my favorite theme was Red Hat's Bluecurve. People still port it to modern DEs, and it still looks good. I think it was ahead of its time, but it never really caught on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluecurve

https://cn.pling.com/img/hive/content-pre1/148927-1.png

My teenage self spent a significant amount of time using custom-made Windows XP theme ("Visual Style") (by hacking UXTheme.dll ; me being an ignorant teenager I probably followed this guide [1] ).

Most of them were gaudy [2] but some of theme I still find attractive even nowadays [3][4].

[1] https://lifehacker.com/how-to-use-custom-windows-visual-styl...

[2] https://www.deviantart.com/unr3al/art/Classix-10k-2-1883531

[3] https://www.deviantart.com/fugacious/art/HmmXP-2-0-1-5514034

[4] https://www.deviantart.com/b0se/art/Codename-Opus-3-0-924039...

There was also the never released Royale Noir, Royale Blue, Embedded, and Zune themes, which were even signed and didnt need uxtheme.dll patched.

https://www.istartedsomething.com/20061029/royale-noir/

https://www.askvg.com/download-official-windows-xp-themes-no...

Watercolor was a fantastic theme. I've been a Mac guy since birth, but at the time I used a Watercolor theme on my Mac because it was just that nice

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