For those who still mourn the loss of Rdio, Devin Halladay has a solution. The 19-year-old designer has hand-crafted a Spotify skin for Mac, which brings Rdio’s best design principles to the streaming service that has survived the booms and busts of the modern music industry. You can download the skin over at Halladay’s website, and it requires you to switch your Mac security settings to permit apps downloaded from anywhere. Halladay says there’s some kinks he has to work out, but it should operate like a light mode replacement for Spotify’s desktop app.
Rdio’s shutdown was an emotional moment for a certain subset of forward-looking music lovers. The streaming service was a bastion of an era when Apple, Google, and Spotify didn’t yet have a iron grip on the industry. And Rdio stood out then for its measured, minimalist design — in many ways, it’s what Apple Music should have looked like. So when Rdio filed for bankruptcy last year, and Pandora swooped in to buy up the remnants of its technology, fans decried the loss of one of the best designed streaming services, one that tried and ultimately failed to compete with the giants.
“THIS ISN’T PERFECT, IT ISN’T RDIO, BUT AS OF NOW IT’S THE CLOSEST WE’RE GOING TO GET.”
“I know this little theme can’t recreate the amazing product that Rdio was, but I’m really glad that I found a small way to pay tribute to Rdio’s product and UI in my own way,” Halladay writes. “This isn’t perfect, it isn’t Rdio, but as of now it’s the closest we’re going to get. If you decided to go with Spotify but, like me, you miss Rdio’s light UI, you’re in luck — I discovered that you can skin the Spotify app with CSS.”
[Source:- The Verge]
