The most common problems with skins we find on Wincustomize

Originally posted on Wincustomize.com

Browsing the WindowBlinds skins on Wincustomize and applying them is a source of a lot of joy, but there’s also a drop of frustration. There are some common problems with the skins that skinners notoriously forget to check for. Perhaps my working environment is not typical but since you’ve went all the way to create a skin it’s relatively easy to make it a perfect skin for everyone. So here are the 10 things I find most common to be wrong with a lot of skins:

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How to do that in Stardock IconDeveloper?

Originally posted on Wincustomize.com

Disclaimer

Stardock IconDeveloper is a free icon creation tool available from Stardock Net,Inc. You can download it from here. Stardock also offers an advanced version allowing you to create icons of any sizeand other really cool things like recoloring icons or even whole icons packs as well as skinning them. But as long as you do not need the advanced features available in the Professional version, you’re more than welcome to use the free edition of IconDeveloper.

There was a real storm of posts on the IconDeveloper newsgroups recently asking about how to create icons from files in formats that does not suport transparency or generated by applications that does not support that feature in formats like PNG or TGA. I have decided to write a complete tutorial on how to create icons from images in IconDeveloper.

Easter is closing. So i decided I’ll lookup the WEB for something suitable. A few moments spent with Google releaved something quite appealing:

So I save the file as a bitmap and… well… bitmaps does nto support transparency, at least valid bitmaps that can be generated by generic image editing apps.So I have this gray background around the image I want to turn into the icon. That’s pretty unacceptable.

But I have two sollutions:

1. open the image in an image editong program and remove all the gray pixels, which can be tedious or even impossible with some image editors (like MS Paint for example)


2. open it in IconDeveloper and mark the gray as transparent and let IconDeveloper do all the hard work for you.

Number one is pretty aparent to those who know how to do this and it’s not a subject of this article, now the latter can be a real time saver for you.

So this is how I go about creating the icon from the image? I have just saved as a bitmap on my Desktop, now to turn it into the icon I just right click it and select the highlighted option from the menu:

Right after that Icondeveloper will open the image and offer you a dialog to create the icon from the image

The buttons in the middle allow you to select icon formats you want to create. The formats on the left are standard icon formats available for you to use instantly. The formats in the list on the right are the formats you have already decided to add to the icon you are creating. The buttons “add” and “remove” allow you to shift formats from one list to the other. You can add some odd or non typical formats (even non square ones) by clicking on the “Add custom” button.

On the screenshot above you see a “Select transparent color” button pointed at by the hand cursor. This button will ony be there if your image does not contain alpha channel in it in which case IconDeveloper can inherit the alpha from the original image. Otherwise it makes it possible for you to create a simple binary alpha channel by clicking on that button. Let’s do it:

as shown on the above picture you are shown a small swatch showing you details of the color that you hover over and a small zoom window showing a small part of the image you move your mouse over - magnified. Clicking in any place on the screen will make the color you clicked, thecolor that will be treated as transparent. Now the effect is as follows:

Ok, but what the other settings do. The “Constraint proportions of the original image” causes IconDeveloper to keep the image’s aspect ratio, meaning that the shape of the image will not be affected while it’s being stretched. This is there not to cause e.g. circles to become some weird ellipses or turning squared into odd nn squared rectangles and so on. Otherwise if your source image would not be perfectly square you would experience something like you do watching a widescreen movie or a regular TV set after the movie has been stretched to the TV’s full height. This can be funny at times, but must not always be intended.

Now as to the “Resample image”. If you turn it off or select the “Nearest Neighbor” entry from the combo box, The iameg can become choppy, just like you would be watching the bare pixels enlarged. The various settings in the combo are similar to what you can find in an analogous Combo while you resize your image in Photoshop. Those are Various techniques to make your image log good when resized. As Seen on the screenshots I prefer this setting to be set to “Laczos3″ as it generally gives me the best results, but you may choose to experiment which one you find workins gest for you. Various images may look better with various settings in the combo, but Lanczos3 generally produces a reasonably good results.

The third option below the left list is only meaningfull for 256 colors, 16 colors and monochromatic formats. Dithering is a technique used in computer graphics to create the illusion of color depth in images with a limited color palette (quantization). Checkout Wikipedia for more details.

SkinStudio also offers you a various algorithms to check which looks best on your images. As shown on the images:

In most cases however, if I ever need formats of 256 colros or lower, I find “Floyd Strinberg” method to work the best for me. You could have already noticed the images in the list on the left being dithered. Otherwise experiment to see which settings works best for you. Dithering is meaningless for the “Windows XP” and “16,7M colors” formats.

Pressing the OK button now will give you a nice icon that you may then save to a file.

Now this is turned out quite nice, didn’t it?

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Making sure everything in place, just where it should be.

Originally posted on Wincustomize.com

Implementing FireFox support in SkinStudio and having to calculate everyting carefully in the process I got pretty tired of being unable to tell how wide something is or having to run a separate app for it. Is there one actually? I guess there is… perhaps even skinnable. But being where I am - I wanted it integrated and easy to use for myself and for every skiner. available instantaneously. Seamlessly integrated into Skinstudio. (This will be available in the next SkinStudio release),

So here’s my attempt at counting pixels.

You probably already used Skinstudio zooming tool, and you’ve noticed that apart from magnifying the screen it also tells you the color of a pixel under the cursor.

now if you press the Ctrl key it will start to measure whatever you have highlighted

As you can see - additionally to the RGB values, now you also have the “Width” and “Height” values. Now, while still having the Ctrl key pressed, let me move the cursor down and right a bit…

as you can see, the Width and Height values show the difference between what was the mouse position when you pressed the “Ctrl” key and what it is now. The size is measured as long as you hol the “Ctrl:” button pressed.

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How WindowBlinds 4.5 made the window frames even more frolicsome.

Originally posted on Wincustomize.com

WindowBlinds 4.5 introduced two new cool tricks for window frames -

• IE/Explorer special shell frames, and
  
• random frames.

The two features are mutually exclusive, meaning that if you use random frames you cannot specify the special frames for the shell windows.
First of all - both features are only available in the UIS2 skins (Advanced WindowBlinds skinning format).

Now let me explain how you can use/access the features in SkinStudio and what exactly do they do:

1) Shell windows

Those are the system windows that you browse/explore your computer and the Internet with. SkinStudio added a special section for referencing them placed in the tree in this node: “Window Borders”->”Frames for Shell Windows”. The section defines two attributes:

• “Explorer Active Windows”
  
• “Explorer Inactive Windows”

The names are pretty self explanatory. The attributes define the indexes of the states used for the active and inactive shell windows. But what you may find confusing is that the index is zero based - meaning that the first state in your frame set has an index of 0. If you define the attributes WindowBlinds will choose those states for shell windows instead of it’s regular choice being - the first state for active and the last one for inactive windows.

What you need to do is simply make your window frame images contain two more states for the shell windows so instead of 2 or 3 (if you define the disabled state) images you would include normally - you put 4 or 5 states in there. Of course the states layout setup cannot violate the 3 canonic WindowBlinds rules which are:

• first state is for the regular active window.
  
• last state is for the inactive window (or the second from the end if disabled state is used).
  
• and if you have the “Disabled frame state” enabled in the skin, that is you have this attribute:
  Section: “Window Borders”-> Attribute: “Miscellaneous options”->”Image State - Disabled Frame”
  set to “Enabled”, then the “disabled state” must be added as the last state in the strip. By the way - if you never realized this before - disabled frames are used when a window is showing a modal dialog that makes this window inaccessible for the user. You can find when a window is disabled if Windows will *ding* at you when you try to click such disabled window.

So this forces us to use a following states layout:

1. Active window
   
2. Active shell window (this is the state that you need to point at in the “Explorer Active Windows” attribute - in this case you would need to set it to “1″ since the index is zero based).
   
3. Inactive shell window (this is the state that you need to point at in the “Explorer Inactive Windows” attribute - in this case you would need to set it to “1″ since the index is zero based).
   
4. Inactive window state
   
5. Disabled window state (if the disabled state visualization is enabled).

That’s all that it is to it. Of course you need to equip all the window edge images with the equally same states number as that’s a fundamental WindowBlinds requirement.

2) Random frames

Random frames is a feature which I personally find much cooler than the shell windows skinning. This feature actually changes the windows states layout established so long ago. You enable the feature by flipping the:

Section: “Window Borders”-> Attribute: “Miscellaneous options”->”Random frame selection”

from “Disable random borders” to “Enable random borders”.

By doing so you allow WindowBlinds to randomize the available frames looks for newly created windows. If this option is enabled, the skin must provide more than one pair of active/inactive states for windows borders. The borders must be organized in sets of pairs of active and inactive states following each other like that:

1. active state 1
   
2. inactive state 1
   
3. active state 2
   
4. inactive state 2
   
5. …
   
6. …
   
7. active state X
   
8. inactive state X

Also like previously - exactly the same number of states needs to be supplied for all edges of the window frames. Also there is another limitation here - all states must be of the same shape, which means that if you put any pink area on the frame in the active1 state - it needs to be in the exact same shape in all the active states as well and unless you enabled Dynamic frames (Section: “Window Borders”-> Attribute: “Miscellaneous options”->”Dynamic Frame Image Shape”) - it needs to be in all of the disabled states too.

WindowBlinds will choose among the pairs on a random basis during creation of each window/app.

Now if you define say… 20 framesets - the user will have a few hours of fun and surprises with the skin. I can see how this is a big job to define that number of frames, but isn’t a skin an enormous effort already? Now if you add just a little bit to it making it exceptional - don’t we all agree that it’s what lies in the heart of customization? I can see how this could be a true favorite feature (on top of the translucent start menus) in the coming months

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If you’re an msstyles author you may want to read it.

Originally posted on Wincustomize.com

Very important: Recoloring/converting or altering icons or skins does not change the original author’s copyright, nor does it make such skin yours! If you recolor/convert or alter a skin or icon that has not been made by yourself you may not upload or share the modified skin or icon without the original author’s permission.

Working on enhancing the porting filter in the most recent months I’ve been working with various msstyles authors (and a lot of them either ported or allowed to port their msstyles). And almost always the first question that arises is - “What’s the point? I can use Windows XP built in theming after all. What does it give me to release my style as a WindowBlinds skin?”

1. WindowBlinds skins non-theme aware programs so all of Windows would have the style, not just theme aware ones.
   
2. Users can mix and match toolbar and progress animations with it (yes there are other ways to do this but nothing as easy as WindowBlinds).
   
3. You can change its color easily on the fly.
   
4. For most people, it’ll run significantly (i.e. noticeably) faster. Hardware acceleration!
   
5. You can assign other mouse button operations to the title bar.
   
6. You can easily add buttons that enhance the theme’s functionality.
   
7. You can apply advanced recoloring to it with SkinStudio.
   
8. With minimum effort you can enable dropdown menus skinning after conversion.
   
9. Setting SkinStudio use “maximum quality” option during conversion will make your menu bar skinned as it was a toolbar.
   
10. Ability to integrate the skin with the font (the font is installed automatically as the skin is used). It comes with the skin in one WBA (WindowBlinds zipped skin) so there is no risk the theme will look weird if user forgets to install the font or just skip reading the readme where you advise him/her to.
    
11. Ability to associate the skin with the toolbar icons so that they are automatically applied once you start using the skin. Same with Animations if the msstyles contains them as well. No need for them to use Additional programs as Y’Z toolbar or replace system files.
    
12. User can set the Visual Style to be used for a single app while having another one fot the whole system.
    
13. Users do not have to hack the dlls vital to their system systems functioning. This may not be important for you, but believe me it has raised concern more than once among our customers. That was why actually we decided to make the MSStyles converter. Our customers liked some of the msstyles but didn’t want to hack their system files.
    
14. On my ssytem (though you may have either confirm or an feel differently) WindowBlinds is more stable than Msstyles. Actually changing msstyles (And I’m changing both of them a lot) kills an application running on my system at least once a 4 changes of a theme. Will it be Firefox(a lot), my Bluetooth stack (more seldom) or my programing IDE(really, really popular at dying). It practically does not happen to WindowBlinds any longer. And being an msstyles author you most probably know very well what I’m talking about.
    
15. There is no way you could make an Msstyle that a company like Nintendo, nVidia (or here), Marvel, ATI or Microsoft (or here) would pay you for. Those are just the few themes off a top of my head, but WindowBlinds skinners are making paid themes on a daily basis. The reason why you cannot sell your MSstyle to them is that there is no way for the user to apply the theme in a legitimate way. No - a hack is not legitimate even if some companies sell them). I’m sure you’re in it for fun and not for money. That’s cool, but making a few bucks now and then doing what you love is really nice, isn’t it?

That’s just 15 reasons that I think of first when someone asks me “Why WindowBlinds“. If you’re still undecided just download SkinStudio and you should be able to just double click on your .msstyles file (make sure you unzip it to a directory first) and have it imported in. SkinStudio is a free download that will not expire on you and will allow you to convert msstyles to WindowBlinds and edit your themes indefinitely!

Be aware that even though it’s still not perfect (especially the Free version is rather old) there will be a new SkinStudio release right after the New Year (Jan 2005) that will significantly improve upon what it does now. Object Desktop subscribers may already enjoy some of the improvements. More to come!

I used elements of Brad’s post from Neowin in my article - thanks for the inspiration Brad.

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How to successfully recolor skins with SkinStudio.

Originally posted on Wincustomize.com

I am aware that this article is partially redundant. I’ve written similar article in about a year ago but it was concerning icons. IconDeveloper is fairly similar in this term to SkinStudio since they share a great deal of their code base. However there I suppose there may be a significant number of people not realizing that - hence the article.

So we have christmas again. I tell you - I love Mormegil’s great ChristmasTime skin pack. Though Christmas do not necessarily come in blues for me. It comes in reds, it comes in greens and in golds. Now let’s take a look at the skin:

Yup. definitely too much blues. But hey! I’ve got SkinStudio!

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