#7
Tue, 21 Jun 2005 - 21:50
QuickTime Player will be skinnable again using ThemePark and ShapeShifter once I've updated ShapeShifter's infrastructure in such a way that it can sanely handle large internal changes between different versions of the same application. QuickTime Player changed completely between version 6 and version 7 - it's a whole new app now and the previous skin resources no longer make sense.
Quicktime Player, in versions prior to version 7, was somewhat of a bitch to skin for two reasons - it was an old, crufty Carbon application, and it was already skinnable - it was actually possible to distribute a movie that included a customized player skin. I've never actually seen one, but it was technically possible to do. I don't believe that it still is, now that QT 7 has been released, although I'm not 100% sure.
iTunes is a completely different story. It's difficult to skin because it's an old crufty Carbon app, but more importantly, because it's an old, crufty Powerplant Carbon app. PowerPlant was an application framework distributed by Metrowerks back in the day, and there was a time when the majority of Macintosh apps used it, before the release of OS X. Since iTunes uses PowerPlant, it does things completely differently from every other app on your hard drive.