Cory Watilo

I've been a gadget freak ever since I was young. The first gadget I remember buying (in my early teens) was my Diamond Rio, one of the first MP3 players to hit the market. It had 32 MB of storage, enough to store about a single album back in the day. (I think mine may have been the second variation of the device.)

Around the same time, I picked up a Palm device. Eventually, it led me to purchase my Jornada 720, which I still have this day (I think I still have my Rio, too). The Jornada 720 shipped with Windows CE, similar to Windows found on the Pocket PC, but made to be more desktop-like with a start menu across the bottom. It also came with programs like Word, Excel, and Solitare. It was essentially a micro version of a laptop, and what we might even consider today as the precursor to the netbook that we have today.

There was a large online community around these devices found in newsgroups. I remember being quite active in these groups that I would subscribe to them via Outlook Express, the only way I knew how to join newsgroups at the time. (Many posts I was involved in have been archived on websites and can now be found via Google.) It was through these groups that I found out about HPC Factor, run by Chris Tilley and Clinton Fitch, both who were very active in help support new users to the HPC platform.

The Jornada came installed with Windows Media Player, and several skins that allowed for customization of the player's look and feel. Naturally, I wasn't too impressed with any of the choices, so I decided to figure out how to make my own skin for the HPC version of Windows Media Player. I was very big on personalization, and wanted my device to look and work just like I wanted it to. As it turns out, the skin I created and submitted to HPC Factor is still up and available on their website. (If you scroll down, you'll see WMP7.1, the skin I created.)

The design I submitted wasn't anything new - it was a port of the desktop version of Windows Media Player 7. I know it doesn't look like much, but for me, this was huge. It was the first coding project I did, aside from a little HTML for my own personal site.

Here is a screenshot of my port of Windows Media Player 7 for the HPC Jornada 720. Data (song title, track position, volume level) populated this screenshot when a song played.

The best part is how I created it: I used nothing but Notepad and MS Paint. I didn't have anything else other than the programs that shipped with Windows. I simply took a screenshot of the desktop version of Windows Media Player and moved elements around in Paint until I made it look how I liked. Little did I know at the time, but I was actually creating an image sprite.

A simple image sprite for the pause, repeat(?) and playlist buttons.

A mapped out image of the play, stop, volume, previous and next buttons. I then told the skin which color to read for each button.

Then for the code, I opened an existing skin in Notepad and changed elements until it looked the way I wanted them to.

Here's a shot of the code I wrote for this particular skin. The numbers you see above are coordinates that reference the images shown above.

I hadn't realized until recently, but this is what gave me my start in playing with graphics and code.

Fast forward nearly a decade and I now enjoy skinning shopping carts and Posterous themes, and have a career working in graphics and code and doing what I love. I can't say I'd be in the same place today if it weren't for this little experiment, because I wanted to customize the experience on my device. I also have to thank my supportive parents who, despite for never understanding why I wanted to buy the gadgets I did, never refused me from using my own money for these devices. Without their support, I might be in a totally different place in my life.

So here's to experimentation and spending money on devices that don't seem like more than the gadget of the week. Because you never know what they'll lead to.