Hey,
I'm Martin Pöhlmann from Germany and part of the Winamp User Interface Team. For those of you who don't know me yet let me quickly introduce myself: With the release of Winamp 5.5 in October 2007 you have seen the first work I've done for Nullsoft: The coding of Winamp's new Single User Interface called Bento. After this release I have extended the Winamp Skinning Engine with lots of features requested by the community as well as helped reviewing skins and plugins users have committed.

So what has happened on the skin and plugin front in 2008?

The first thing that came into my mind was the Skinning Framework ClassicPro developed by Pieter Niewoudt and my friends over at Skin Consortium. ClassicPro gives you the power to create single window skins just the same way as Winamp Classic Skins. Till now the ClassicPro Framework has been downloaded over 1 Million times from different download mirrors what is a huge success. But this would only have been possible with lots of people creating cool skins for it!

Thus, let's start with my top 3 Winamp Classic Pro Skins.
First there is "cPro Insomnis". It has a dark and stylish user interface and is now offered with a bunch of cool color themes.
Then we have "cPro Relax", a colored and nice styled skin which was the clear winner of the "Skinning Shootout" held by Skin Consortium.
Another highlight was the release of "cPro MMD" - the official ClassicPro port of the legendary MMD3 skin by Sven Kistner.


But also the Classic Skin developers have done some great work!
My absolute favourite is "MMVIII" by GaretJax and mike_db - a great level of detail and nice colors, so go and check it out!
As a counterpart to this skin David Wood has created a cool vista styled skin called "Glitch Alienmorph Black" with a modern and clean userinterface.
Last but not least we also have a future styled skin by SMAR Designs: "Acierate" is green and sharp, so don't cut yourself on it!


Unfortunatelly Modern Skin development has suffered from a big decline in 2008. This might be due to the lack of interest of existing coders in creating skins and the hard way to learn modern skinning if you are a beginner. Nevertheless there have also been some highlights in this category:
Taking the download count "Azenis mimi" by itemsoft is the clear winner. A simple and clean interface based on the well-known Azenis theme.
For all Winamp2 fans Corwin has created a revamped and feature picked skin called "NEO CLASSIC".
And we have another winner in this category as well: "krazyPlayer" by Skin Consortium has won the "Winamp Freestyle Skinning Contest" over at deviantArt. This future styled skin has a nice RGB color picker as well as a stunning breathing beat animation.


Well, let's leave the design stuff for a while and take a look at the best Winamp plugins in 2008.
Besides ClassicPro that I have mentioned earlier I love the useful "Desktop Stopper" which stops playback each time your screensaver shows and resumes as soon you start working with your Computer again.
Then there have been some big updates to the two major music management plugins "Dynamic Library" and "The Ultimate Media Library Plugin". Both allow you to manage your music in folders like they are stored on your harddrive.
Another nice idea is the "Mini Tube" by Sanchit Bhatnagar. It searches YouTube for music videos of your currently playing song.


With the Viuslization Plugin "Dr Glitter" I want to make a smooth transition to the cool new visualization stuff for Winamp. Dr Glitter features some nice beat sensitive presets, so check it out.
Nevertheless my favourite is an AVS Preset Package called "acceltratium" since the movements and animations make me stunning.
Generally spoken, it is hard to pick some "best of" presets, but I give you three more: "Lightball", "Second X" and "anotherversion deux". All of those are worth to be tried out.


So this was my fast run through the year 2008! Of course there are plenty of other cool skins and plugins to talk about, so I encourage you to comment and let us know your favorites as well.

Best wishes for 2009,
Martin Pöhlmann