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:
How exactly do you create those criters? At first it may seem a tedious job but once you have all the frames, you’re pretty much set.
First thing I did in my research was asking the experts. I’ve asked some of the skin authors and most of them uses a kind of workaround to this. The most detailed explanation I’ve received from one of the greatest WindowBlinds skinners – Mike Bryant:
There was a concern by some users why SkinStudio shares a start menu with the original substyle when you create another substy;le based on it..
Basically the answer is – It’s not a bug – It’s a feature. It’s like that by design. If you select a prefix on save then you will get another start menu as well, otherwise skinstudio will use the same stuff for 2 reasons.
it does not know how to name the new “xpstuff.xp”.
it does not know whether you really want to break the connection. You may as well want to just make a variation of your skin with slightly different titlebar buttons.
But imagine it did that so 2 things happen – you didn’t specify the prefix to create new images so once you change the images in one substyle you change them in the other too since you didn’t tell it to make copies of them. Now imagine how outrageous it would be. “But it uses another xpstuff.xp” you would say. “Why one substyle breaks the other substyle images” you would say. And you would be right. if everything’s duplicated then everything is duplicated, if nothing then nothing.
Now let me show you the solution to the problem. I usedto direct people to the “Code” tab forgettig that the combo for “non image” file references is actually editable. But today I’ve read an easier sollution, by Tiggz:
When you want the substyle to have a different start menu, after you create the new substyle you need to click “taskbar” in the navigation tree in the left hand side of the window, then over on the right click on the word file, and then below, in the “value” text entry field you can change the name from the default (XPStuff.xp).
Very important: Recoloring or skinning icons does not change the original author’s copyright, nor does it make such icons yours. If you recolor or skin an icon that has not been made by yourself you may not upload or share a recolored icon without the original author’s permission.
In the next few days Stardock is publishing the next component of it’s extremely successful ObjectDesktop. The new component is called IconDeveloper – the tool’s , I’m the developer of, main purpose is to make it easy for casual users to create icons and make it faster and more efficient for professional icon artists to do their work. Celebrating the event I decided to write a short article about going really crazy with icons and how to do it with IconDeveloper. What skinning means (but is not limited to) is changing the look of certain part of applications. The article will describe how you can change the appearance of an IconPackager theme or an Icl file (Icon library).
So you recolored your icons already? (If not checkout the article about mix matching your themes with your skins – the functionality described there is now a part of IconDeveloper). But it still isn’t enough? Why stop on recoloring? Why not make your icons exactly how you want them to be? Why not SKIN THE ICONS?
I have recolored according to my taste (or lack of it) the great Bant’s “Ciela” Visual Style (Please do not ask for the recolored skin. Curtesy of Bant, it’s available here for free and you can easilly recolor it with SkinStudio). It has a kind of toxic look now, which if you have seen the screenshots in some of my previous articles, you have probably noticed I’ve developed a taste for.
Since i can never get enough of the marvelous PixOs icons by Paul Boyer I have decided to recolor them to match the skin.
But since I’ve done the recoloring already, should I stop there? Let’s open the modded “PixOs Toxic”…
Select a new name for skinned theme and specify that I want to actually “skin” it…
Now what can we do here… I know! Let’s set it on fire!
Or make it suffer in a really polluted environment… sorry Paul
and actually make it ultimately match my skin of choice… and a bit smoked (Why? Why not?!). To do this I’ve had to edit an image from the Visual Style to create a bevel I can now use as a background (made for sake of this artticle only). You can actually use any image for either a background or overlay – just press the “Browse” button and select the image you want to use.
The possibilities are countless. IconDeveloper comes with a number of backgrounds and overlies for you to toy with, but the real potential is in your creativity. Make your own icon’s skins. The sky is the limit!
A few days back I found that nice Visual Style. Really easy on eyes – perfect for coding – titlebar not to high – not too many distractions. So i ran it through Skinstudio, added a few mods to make it the nice place to look and shown it to Pas (Snidely Whiplash). He’s made a couple of mods himself and I wanted to have them in my skin. But my skin was USF (yes you can apply USF skins to WindowBlinds with Skinstudio) and his was WindowBlinds. But the image format is the same, so i could just copy it and change the settings in my skin. But how would i do that without wasting an hour chasing all the attributes that needs to be changed? So i came up with 2 easy features to do that.
Extract from the change log:
– added possibility to copy and paste images between skins! Just select image attribute in the section view and right click it and press copy. Now right click the image attribute in the other skin and select Paste. Skinstudio will actually copy the image from one skin to another!
– made it possible to copy images from explorer and paste it to Skinstudio. Just select the image file in the explorer and copy it with Ctrl+C or any other method Explorer supports, then in skinstudio select the target attribute in the list, right click it and select pause from the popup menu – Skinstudio will ask you what do you want to do with the image if the file was actually an image
It builds on top of another feature i’ve added recently – as for now you may just copy bitmap from your favorite image program – take Photoshop for example and just paste it into Skinstudio in the form of bitmap. based on the attribute or control you have currently selected (image attribute must be currently selected) skinstudio will do all the boring work for you.
Ctrl+C , Ctrl+V it’s as easy as that. Skinstudio asks you an easy question then and takes care of all the layout changes you may ever need.
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