In a setback to Nullsoft's plans, Winamp3 in March gave way to the earlier Winamp 2.x version, pending a broader overhaul that will incorporate aspects of both in Winamp 5. In the meantime, AOL has discontinued supporting plug-ins developed using Wasabi and will instead fold Winamp3 graphical interface designs, or "skins," into Winamp 2.x.
I just ran across this in the news. Good to see the Nullsoft developers are smart enough to listen to the community. I know they spent a lot of time working on WA3—and it's always hard to turn your back on code you've spent a lot of time developing—but let's face it, WA3 blew. I upgraded for like a day, but quickly went back to WA2.
I don't want lots of gimmicks with my mp3 player. I want a small thin visual interface and it should use as little system resources as possible. In my opinion, no other mp3 player has even tempted to switch from WA2—except for WA3 of course, which I had high hopes for.
Anyway, I'm glad to see they're listening to the community at working to come up a new version that builds on WA2's strengths, while keeping the things introduced in WA3 that won't bog the PC down. I really think WA3 was a good example of "XML gone bad" that we're seeing in a lot of applications. XML is great, but it seems as XML was picking up popularity, people started using it in ways that weren't the most appropriate. It seemed like Nullsoft was trying to make a completed programmable XML API (WASABI), and I think that was part of the reason it was so sluggish and CPU intensive.
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