WindowBlinds “PerPixel” 5 - new features explanatory series - part two.
Originally posted on Wincustomize.com
If Stardock gave WindowBlinds version names like Microsoft did with XP and its successor, WindowBlinds 5 would probably be called “WindowBlinds Translucent” or “WindowBlinds See-Through” or… oh no… it can’t be… or can it (?) “WindowBlinds Vista”!
In the first part I’ve explained the most noticeable changes you will see in a new WindowBlinds 5 skin but to be honest it went all crazy about translucent parts. We’ve got used to the translucent start panel since 4.6 which I’ve described how to create in this article. But in WindowBlinds 5 you can make the whole taskbar translucent as well as the drop down menus, and the “Please Wait” dialog!
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WindowBlinds 5 “PerPixel” new features explanatory series - part one.
Originally posted on Wincustomize.com
One of the coolest features of WindowBlinds 5 is the possibility to define a translucent frames in your skin. This means a lot of things and a lot of new possibilities. Your windows can drop shadows, glow but most of all you don’t have to look at those jaggies if your skin features rounded corners in them. The level of excitement can probably be shown by the fact that it does not have even shown in the public beta, yet it already has artists creating artwork advocating it. and a number of authors creating a mock-ups of the skins they intend to create. I have to admit I do not recall being contacted so much about any previous version of WindowBlinds and any other version that generated such passion among even the MSStyles users.
The new window frames blend nicely into the current feature set of WB.
The window part is divided into 5 parts, one for each side: top, bottom, left and right like in the following picture:
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How does one define a font to use for WindowBlinds.
Originally posted on Wincustomize.com
I find a lot of users having problems with how fonts are defined in a WindowBlinds skin. It’s quite simple once you understand it how it’s done.
WindowBlinds bases on the premise that most of the skins use just a small number of font variants but use them in a number of places, meaning that one font setting will be used in a number of places like a push button, a tab, a status bar.
A font setting in SkinStudio is called “font preset” and is a set of font name, size and formatting as well as its shadow settings. When you think of it in the terms of any word processor a font setting is not different from “styles” used e.g. in Microsoft Word. And they are equally as useful! in contrast to MSStyles where you define the font for every control or its sub style in WindowBlinds you only define it a few times and then use them in multiple places.
What’s better… if you decide to change the font in a style, do it only once for the style and WB will change it everywhere the font is used! Let me show you how it’s working on a sample skin for a push button.
Every control section has a font setting (at least one) in most cases grouped in the “Fonts” subgroup in its section section.
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Another feature that you may find helpful in your day to day skinning.
Originally posted on Wincustomize.com
It all started with another brain-freeze today. I just couldn’t find a section that contained the File Dialog places bar images. You know the bar on the left on the File->Save and File->Open dialogs? I bet you’ve been cursing more than once searching for a section like that. SkinStudio will help you with searching for a section if you know it’s UIS name or its part AND if such section actually exist. But in my case it didn’t.
Wouldn’t it be great if I could just lookup the section by it’s name or a part of it?
So I’ve added a tool button like you can see on the image below.
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As all problems this one appears to obvious when you know the answer.
Originally posted on Wincustomize.com
Little I knew that I will be involved in it, when I was posting a while ago on Neowin and WinMatrix about the cool Warcraft skins available on Wincustomize. Blizzard is offering a World of Warcraft suite now for download on their US and European pages pages and upon their request we needed to swiftly modify the Apocalypse’s great World_of_Warcraft skin to meet Blizzard’s request to match the game GUI more closely. I was assigned to the task so I went swiftly to the local store with the perfect excuse to get myself a new toy!
- Honey, but I need it for work…
- Sure you do!
- but really, darling… look…
… so I started hacking the game files to get some artwork out of it. As it appears there’s a lot of people looting the game resources than one could expect… a bi-product of it you can find in my previous article here.
But to the point….
Out of the game files I got some cool graphics, now I’m not really good with with design but equipped with some original artwork I can be pretty dangerous. So I got some artwork out of the game and started cutting and pasting this auction window:
as you can notice the frame drops a nice shadow and I wanted to reflect that in the skin. To make the long story short I ended up with this design:
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Why can’t graphic applications get their channels right?
Originally posted on Wincustomize.com
[Updated 11 May 2005] Read at the end of the article.
I’ve been on a quest to improve a skin today and to do so I needed to extract a big archive in a proprietary and not widely supported format and get the images out of it and into the skin. Turned out the first part was not as bad as I expected as I’ve found some tools on the net to do this and Kris helped with the tool to convert the images in the proprietary format into TGA’s. Now here’s where the pain begun.
I needed to have my alpha channel kept in the files but I also wanted to process the files before making them into the skin.
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