This week, we learned that frog design, the legendary product-design company, created the overall visual design for Windows Media Player for Windows XP (MPXP) and the new Windows XP flag. This news should come as no surprise; Microsoft's designs all end up looking like WordPad and the command-line window in XP, which still bears the old Windows 9x-style title bar, even when it uses the new UI. Some of frog design's more famous designs include the Apple II and original Macintosh, the Next cube, and the Vadem Clio. But if you're wondering about the sea of blues and greens that pervade in the new XP UI, wonder no more. That was all Microsoft's doing.

Paul Thurrott asked several people at Microsoft about the additional color schemes that the company had planned for Windows XP, which ships with only standard blue, silver, and olive green color schemes. The answer is a bit complicated. End users, especially technology enthusiasts, would probably love to tweak the XP UI, but a problem is delaying any other color schemes. Third-party XP applications, which enhance the XP UI, would be exponentially more complicated if they couldn't rely on certain color schemes. I saw quite a few of these applications, such as McAfee Security Services, that look so much like XP they're indistinguishable from Microsoft's own bundled features. If Microsoft supported 10 color schemes out of the box, these applications would have to support those schemes as well. I told Microsoft that people still want this capability, and the consensus is that Microsoft will implement additional color schemes, but nobody knows when.