What is the hardest part of Windowblinds to skin?

I find scrollbars to be very hard to do. They're really quite a pain in the rear end I think.

I also don't like the way combo box buttons are handled. It seems like the glyphs are handled weirdly.

those wicked start panel logoff buttons are the hardest for me! Sometimes I just wanna SCREAM! I Hate working with tga format

why don't you use bitmap Ms. crissy14?

I agree with Froggy. Combos are a pain to skin with WB4, especially when you want a rounded button. You can't use a TGA because the border shows through at the ends. I refuse to let my rounded buttons go...

I also have a lot of trouble with the text layout in WB4. Layout presets seem to have been dropped in favour of a much more limited, and almost impossible to handle, choice of alignment for each caption. I spent a full day just trying to get the captions on tabs in the right place.

I don't have wb4 so I don't know if you have to use tga's. I would assume you could use bitmaps just like the other part

yes?

I almost forgot, the third thing that is hard to skin is the start button. It is so hard to figure out what it should look like.


as you can see my problems mainly is what these areas should look like. I have allot on the drawing table and I can't sem o get past those three areas.

artist block maybe?

Hardest part id say, was making Be style skins and how i want overall design to look appart from that the rest is easy, but time consuming.

For me it's MDI buttons. They're akward to blend in if you're using a menubar bg image that's quite intricate.
My fav parts are the XP taskbar and menu. There's so much to work with on them, and lots of room to go crazy.

I don't need much room to go crazy Hippy.

I'm just thinking of others. Don't want any innocent casualties......

I gotta go with combo buttons and those darn spin buttons. They never come out the way I want them to >

Spinners! aarrgghh

yeah the xp panel is great for all sorts of stuff.

I also like the windowblinds borders. You can do anything with those orders. and if you have a text background there is even more stuff you can do.



I should have made this the "what's the hardest and easiest part to skin on windowblinds" thread.

More room for dialog

Hate: Titlebar buttons, MDI buttons, StartPanelUserPane Text alignment (got a skin ready to go and the text just won't cooperate)

Love: Everything else

Hi! First you should draw your main window with all buttons etc. and have a good idea about overeall look. You can draw it on paper maybe ?

Did you know that horizontal scrollbar buttons are the same as horizontal spin buttons ? Just draw scrollbar buttons, copy/paste them as spin buttons. But without the scrollbar bolts > < ^ etc. For spin buttons you should use glyph image because when the spin buttons are stretched (as in skinstudio), they look odd.

I don't really like skinning the 'window' part.

The best part is the start balk and the menu, you can put much big graphics in there... (and animations )

The hardest part for me are the colors (like text, button face, etc.). It is hard to tell what color does exactly what. Everytime it is trial on error. Would be nice to have clear docs about that.

Also very hard to do is to make the skin compatible with older versions of WB or different flavours of Windows.

I use both SKS and a text editor. The naming conventions of the raw format are erm... a little odd to say the least. SKS does a good job in hiding that.

Most sections work the same (i.e. have the same basic ingredients), but a lot of sections do not work like you expect. SKS is a great help for those.

WB is notorious for not fixing bugs. Some of these bugs are there for years. Recently I have given up reporting bugs and I'll try to find ways to circumvent them instead.

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I should be more clear on that last part. I love WB, but I do think its lead programmer is more interested in making the next generation of WB than in fixing bugs in the current one. It is hard to convince him that it aggravates skinners when bugs are not fixed. I am not talking about stability bugs, they are fixed as soon as possible.

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WB is nice, only I think skinning it becomes pretty easy, with liteSTEP you have new challenges all over again, same counts for winamp v3 and wmp

The hardest parts for me are the one's I can't find
You know, that setting to change that little something that is not quite right but seems to be hiding

The worst part is, I know I found it when doing my last skin but, I'll be danged if I can find it now

For me it is always an adventure The hardest part is the black textfonts you can't change. You have to adjust the background to make it readable and from there you end up with colours you don't want.... > And then you change it back to the old bg and you have that darn black non changeable font again
The nice thing is the adventure, going step by step and seeing the skin coming together...

And another 'hard part' the user picture, just can't scale it into a selection...

That's because almost every skinner acounts for a 50x50 usericon(I'm guess you did that). In reality it should be 48x48.

#15 by m0rphium - 6/3/2003 11:53:17 PM Did you know that horizontal scrollbar buttons are the same as horizontal spin buttons ? Just draw scrollbar buttons, copy/paste them as spin buttons. But without the scrollbar bolts > < ^ etc. For spin buttons you should use glyph image because when the spin buttons are stretched (as in skinstudio), they look odd.

I have no idea what your talkin' about...

spin what itz? take out who?

anyway, so what size should the user icon be anyway? And how come I can't figure out a way to change the colour or the mouse over for the start panel in XP??

The pull cord.