How do you change background color in WB Skins?
Monday, February 27, 2006 by MikeO89 | Discussion: WindowBlinds
I have used a lot of skins that I like other than most of them still use the white backgrounds (background when opening folders, etc). I don't particularly like white backgrounds, would like to change the color a bit (maybe like light gray or something). I have WindowBlinds 5 and SkinStudio (Standard). I don't see anywhere to change this.
Any help would sure be appreciated. Thanks
Any help would sure be appreciated. Thanks
MikeO89
Reply #2 Monday, February 27, 2006 9:27 PM
Reply #2 Monday, February 27, 2006 9:27 PM
Thank you very much for helping my dumb ass (I'm very new to this stuff). That worked fine.
There was another entry there called "Background-MDI Window". What's that one do?
There was another entry there called "Background-MDI Window". What's that one do?
jaidaksghost
Reply #3 Monday, February 27, 2006 9:53 PM
Reply #3 Monday, February 27, 2006 9:53 PM
open the .uis of the skin you want to change. in the preview plane scroll down to classic colors. the top one is the active window pane. click on the center of it and you should get a color editing window on the lower window of skinstudio. you can select another color or just capture from somewhere on the screen if the color you want is there. save the skin and you should have it. i do that all the time. i hate dark skins with white windows. hope i helped. 
Daiwa
Reply #4 Monday, February 27, 2006 11:35 PM
Reply #4 Monday, February 27, 2006 11:35 PM
I've always thought that SKS has this intuitively backwards, because it does not follow the conventions used in the traditional Display Properties/Appearance preview.
The "Background - Window" color is the color of the page in a Word document, for example - this is the color that Display Properties has always identified as "Window". If you minimize the document, the color of the application workspace that the minimized document floats on is the "Background - MDI Window" color, what Display Properties has always called "Application Background".
To my way of (apparently distorted) thinking, SKS's Classic Colors preview should show the "Window" color in the Active Window portion of the preview and the "Application Background" color in the Inactive Window portion of the preview (Display Properties itself has never actually displayed this color), but SKS does just the opposite for some reason. And just to be sure we aren't simply slightly confused by this, chooses to use labeling terminology that is different than DP to further obscure things.
The "Background - Window" color is the color of the page in a Word document, for example - this is the color that Display Properties has always identified as "Window". If you minimize the document, the color of the application workspace that the minimized document floats on is the "Background - MDI Window" color, what Display Properties has always called "Application Background".
To my way of (apparently distorted) thinking, SKS's Classic Colors preview should show the "Window" color in the Active Window portion of the preview and the "Application Background" color in the Inactive Window portion of the preview (Display Properties itself has never actually displayed this color), but SKS does just the opposite for some reason. And just to be sure we aren't simply slightly confused by this, chooses to use labeling terminology that is different than DP to further obscure things.
Daiwa
Reply #5 Monday, February 27, 2006 11:39 PM
Reply #5 Monday, February 27, 2006 11:39 PM
I'm not a fan of white window backgrounds, either - I work all the time with documents which have white text, which is obviously invisible on a white background, so I'll also routinely change that if necessary.
MikeO89
Reply #6 Tuesday, February 28, 2006 9:41 PM
Reply #6 Tuesday, February 28, 2006 9:41 PM
Thanks for all this info, I'm eating this stuff up. Creating a skin from scratch at this point is beyond my comprehension. I tried to read that guide on the Skinstudio link and got a headache. Heh heh. What I want to concentrate on is learning how to edit existing ones to my liking in SkinStudio, so I just open a skin up in it and start screwing around to try to understand just what the hell I'm trying to do. There are an awful lot of skins to download but after getting over the novelty of downloading over 200 of them, there are actually very few that I would actually use. Seems too many are concentrating on the fancy features of what can be done and somewhere along the line lose the notion that someone might actually want to use one on a daily basis. A lot of them are just not planned out very well. Color mismatching, text that is too hard to read (wrong color on wrong background). I pull up a lot of them and go "whoa". Then after about 5 minutes I go "nope". Maybe I'm in the minority on this one, namely "Transparent Windows". I just hate them. Seems like that's the craze right now. Nothing is more irrating to me than to pop up a window and have to try to view it along with what's behind it. While some might think it looks cool, to me it's not functional. For my computer viewing, it's nothing more than distracting. When I see a skin I like that has it, that's among the first things I try to figure out how to change, along with color backgrounds I don't like.
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Reply #1 Monday, February 27, 2006 6:10 AM