Version 6
I have to admit, I'm pretty excited about SkinStudio 6. Which is surprising in some respects because I was deeply involved in the design of SkinStudio 1 through 5. With SkinStudio 6, the WindowBlinds team wrote it with my part being mostly that of providing input rather than design direction.
SkinStudio 1 through 5 was designed to provide a quasi-Corel Draw style user interface. The design worked out well in the early days when WindowBlinds wasn't that powerful.
Here is what SkinStudio 5 looked like:
As you can see, it got pretty complicated by version 6.
By contrast, SkinStudio 6 looks like this:
The difference is application designer versus task oriented design. That is, with SkinStudio 6, the skinner simply walks through a series of steps and at the end has a finished skin.
How this will affect the skinning community remains to be seen. But we now have a way for people to easily make their own skins. And best of all, SkinStudio is FREE.