Titlebar buttons

Can somebody describe to me how these titlebar buttons work?? Several skins I've looked at have several copies of the buttons. On my own skin, I've got this weird bug where the buttons dissapear in windows that are not focused. What's going on?

Using Skin Studio 6.
5,642 views 11 replies
Reply #1 Top
It's not a bug. In SKS6 you can set when the buttons show and what they do. Under the UIS2 frames in the Titlebar Buttons section, there is a tab called Visibility. You can change when a button shows there by choosing a particular option. The best way that I have found , is just expiriment with the different settings till you get what you want!
Reply #2 Top
Even if "Always show button" is the only one that is checked, it will still only show in the active window.
Reply #3 Top
Make a seperate button for the inactive window (if you don't already have it) and try clicking both the 'always show' and the 'show if inactive" buttons for the inactive window and see if that works. Be sure to check that nothing else is checked except those two. Thats how I have mine currently set up and it's working.
Reply #4 Top
Turns out that the skin I was using as a base skin was using three images instead of the default six. When I switched to six images for the buttons, it started working.
Reply #5 Top
Good, glad you got it working.  :D 
Reply #6 Top
I like SkinStudio 6, but it does seem quite quirky. Never tried 5, BTW.

One thing that is sorta annoying is that I have to duplicate an image so many times, even if I don't want a separate image for all of the states and it's shared all over the place.

BTW, do you know what colouring masks are?
Reply #7 Top
This is from an older thread on thst subject...
This is from an old guide, but it explains masks:
WindowBlinds 2.0 allows users to change the color of skins. A skin author, however, may not want the entire skin's color changed. Instead, they may only want certain aspects of a skin changed. For instance, you might want your blue title bar to be able to be colored but not have your tray border. So how do you do this?The answer is you create a mask image. A mask image is typically a grayscale image in which white areas are areas you want the colors changed and black areas being ones you don't want changed (with intermediate colors being in between). If you are an expert on colors, you can get fancier and supply a 24bit mask image and come up with some really strange blendings (for instance, if you want only the the reds blended into your skins of a chosen color, you would supply an image with a color mask of 255,0,0 ). We only recommend that for die hards. A gray scale image is the most intuitive way of creating a mask in this instance.To create a mask, you simply take one of your existing bitmaps, turn it to a grayscale and make the areas you want changeable white and those you don't want changed black.
End of quote


Reply #8 Top
A rarely used and now mostly unnecessary feature because of the new colorize abilities in WB6. ;) 
Reply #9 Top
Thanks for the explanation, Xiandi!

A rarely used and now mostly unnecessary feature because of the new colorize abilities in WB6.
End of quote


A skin developer may want to include some color schemes with his/her own set of colors, or want the ability to control which parts of the skin are colorized. Some skins may have decorations that will look ugly if colorized. It sounds pretty useful for more complex skins.
Reply #10 Top
Thanks for the explanation, Xiandi!
End of quote


Pictoratus deserves the credit for that one. He found it for me a little while ago. ;) 
Reply #11 Top
Some skins may have decorations that will look ugly if colorized. It sounds pretty useful for more complex skins.
End of quote


Yes,that is when a mask is a great idea...the rest of the skin can change colors but a specific element should be left alone. :)