I think it has more to do with the authors and their principles, and less with the times. There are plenty of counterexamples from that era: all major browsers, the Sonique audio player (which I loved for the UI novelty), Winamp itself, etc.
> any other software that has always worked and remained pretty much the same?
mpv is in that league for me, and it's much more recent. Then, of course, there are very stable CLI and power user software that has existed for decades: Vim, Emacs, BSD and Linux coreutils, etc. Some of these are not necessarily simple under the hood, but I use them because they do one thing well (or in the case of Vim/Emacs as much as I want them to do :)), and I know that they're not going to disappear or drastically change as so many software does.
I'm still using it to this day, with little more than an album tree, a playlist window, and an album art thumbnail that optionally all fold away.
I've been down the configuration | plugin trail, good fun for those of us that enjoy that kind of thing but it is | was simple and clean from a fresh install.
IIRC, they were in a sort of PHP-looking scripting language? I had very little coding experience before then, so it was kind of a trip trying to debug why the lyrics panel would freak out under certain scenarios :D
https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=25334.0
Which does confirm that Faststone is faster but much water has passed under the bridge since 2011.
Irfanview is another “goes on every desktop install”. I even use it on Linux via wine.
Haha, it's not the same even for any specific version. With plugins and ability to move panels around, it's hard to say all these UIs are the same player. Search for "foobar2000 theme" in google images
It's hard to come back from that.
variety of reasons.
mine: it broke a huge amount of visualizers/dsps/skins.
It wasn’t until two years later that the store was integrated as part of an update.
Although there was an (Carbon?) OS X version for a while, Winamp was Windows-only from what I knew, so my opinion of it was always coloured by having to use Windows to interact with it, although I used CrossOver on Mac and Mint as well.
iTunes, when tied to a "megacorp's business model," still suffered from piss-poor UI. Take, for example, the "LCD" display at the top of the UI that was even depicted as having a transparent cover over it... yet had undemarcated clickable controls in it (which you were likely to never discover).
So I don't see the relationship between good or bad UI and business models in this case.
Want to mirror your front channels to your back channels? Easily done in foobar2k, while many other media players already fail here, even those whose main task is to do audio output.
Easy to do when you don't have bosses breathing down your neck about adding in podcasts and audiobooks, then nudging users into engaging with that stuff first so that they don't have to pay as much to the music rights holders.
It's remarkable how they've kept the same UI since its inception, 21 years ago. It was clean, simple and intuitive back then, and still is today. Same goes for the website, now that I think of it. A true testament that simplicity trumps trend-chasing.
It was my main music player after Winamp released the awful version 3.0, and I never looked back. I don't use Windows much these days, but mpv serves me well as a barebones audio player, and occasionally I do use Quod Libet on Linux, which has similar design sensibilities as fb2k.