SkinStudio 6 Beta Feedback

Tuesday, August 7, 2007 by Neil Banfield | Discussion: Stardock Support General

Please post general feedback about SkinStudio 6 here.

You must have WindowBlinds 6 beta installed to use SKS6, but any skins made with it should work with WindowBlinds 5 as well.

This is a beta so you should expect missing sections and bugs.  If you find SKS is missing support for a specific section, please let us know!

If you are working on a new skin it would be best to ensure it is backed up before using SKS6.  Remember in this beta all changes are saved instantly!

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LightStar
Reply #41 Saturday, August 11, 2007 9:08 AM
Thank you Z71! That solved some of my problems, I really appreciate it.

LightStar
Reply #42 Saturday, August 11, 2007 9:10 AM
Uhhhm, OK, is that going to be fixed for XP at some point then Neil? The mouseover text color on the Start Menu issue?

Neil Banfield
Reply #43 Saturday, August 11, 2007 5:22 PM
The mouseover colour not being used when you use a startmenu item mouseover bitmap is an unfortunate limitation of that feature.  It is unlikely this will change on XP in the future.

LightStar
Reply #44 Saturday, August 11, 2007 8:25 PM

The mouseover colour not being used when you use a startmenu item mouseover bitmap is an unfortunate limitation of that feature. It is unlikely this will change on XP in the future.


Thanks Neil, for some reason after I rebooted the problem with the MO text remaining as Luna went away, go figure!

Excalpius
Reply #45 Saturday, August 11, 2007 9:51 PM
First, kudos on the new version. I was one of those had many negative experiences with the previous version (corruption, crashes, black-box descriptions, cluttered interface, etc.) so I never put the work in to get over the hump. BUT, this version is phenomenal. So much easier.

Only the Xion player skin system (layers in a single PSD become the skin elements, with the names of the layers connecting X element with Y feature) rivals the new v6 of SkinStudio. BRAVO!!!

I got so into it that the first thing I tried to experiment with stopped me cold. There seems to be no way to make the explorer backgrounds (active/inactive) transparent (semi/full). Am I missing something? Is this coming?

It's really essential to one of the ideas I have. Thanks.

Neil Banfield
Reply #46 Sunday, August 12, 2007 6:06 AM
Explorer backgrounds cannot be transparent.

Excalpius
Reply #47 Sunday, August 12, 2007 6:50 AM

Explorer backgrounds cannot be transparent.


...yet. Any explorer replacement could, of course, etc. etc.

Why didn't they make this possible with DWM? It's the whole point of the thing to bring everything into the hardware accelerated GPU space...doh.

I can already hack an inelegant solution by just clipping my desktop wallpaper and making it the bitmap of the explorer background. That's useful for my day to day proof of concept, but it doesn't work for everyone else...sigh.

Jonep
Reply #48 Sunday, August 12, 2007 9:12 AM
Lookin good guys, In the edit tool windows screen I can only find close button how can you add the minimise button for apps like Photoshop

kin242
Reply #49 Sunday, August 12, 2007 11:59 AM
Kind of peeved by this app. I spent ages making a skin - having clicked the 'new skin' button... only to have it rejected because 'it contains elements of other peoples skins'. OK I know I did not skin every single last bit- it was a first effort for gods sake- but surely the default skin should not be made up of 'elements of other peoples work'... I mean if I click on new skin I expect it to be a blank slate- not to be accused of stealing for using some of the default settings!!!

Neil Banfield
Reply #50 Sunday, August 12, 2007 12:55 PM

kin242: what was the name of the skin you submitted?

Jonep: Toolwindows do not support minimize buttons.  Any minimize buttons you see in apps are manually added by those apps by using the minimized window button images instead.


kin242
Reply #51 Sunday, August 12, 2007 2:07 PM
My submittal was called minimally. Everything apart from the default skins was hand-made by me in photoshop...

Cavan1
Reply #52 Sunday, August 12, 2007 3:32 PM
Hey Neil, follow-up to reply 36, can you give us an idea when for start menu and taskbar that trans and blur will not be linked so we can have just trans or trans with blur. Now it is blur or nothing.

NienorGT
Reply #53 Tuesday, August 14, 2007 3:08 AM
To be honest, I hate Skinstudio6 (Well, I never really liked SKS5 as well...) it's worst than SKS5, there no tabs for more than one skins, the window popups just make the skinning progress slower and confusing, where is the code part to manual editing?, bug analyzing and correction?, shellstyle in XP?... Well, there lot of lacking features that SKS5 as. XP/Vista differences just confuse me, there must be a better way like put a selector to show only XP skinning or only Vista skinning parts. Sorry for the bad commenting dev team but I needed to let that out. I hope the current SKS6 Beta is far from the final form, take your time, there is no fire...

Neil Banfield
Reply #54 Tuesday, August 14, 2007 6:25 AM

NEE77: I am sorry you do not like SKS6, but many of the changes are by design.

There is no need for a skin author to directly access the UIS code.

If you want to edit more than one skin, open another copy of SKS6.  Think of it like notepad.  If you want to edit two txt files you just open a second copy.

The bug analysing and correction feature in SKS5 was more trouble than it was worth.  Frequently it flagged things which were not issues and gave the user the impression that the skin had serious problems.  Worse, the correct these errors feature can damage a skin.

Shellstyles can be edited under the XP specific sections. 


tosbsas
Reply #55 Tuesday, August 14, 2007 8:37 AM
I was trying to make a right hand version of flahorns classic leopard, all buttons but one could be moved, thats that one that was right side and should be left now - sorry no knowledge how to explain it better, but no access to that button.

Ideas why??

Ruben

Neil Banfield
Reply #56 Tuesday, August 14, 2007 8:58 AM
Which button were you unable to move?

tosbsas
Reply #57 Tuesday, August 14, 2007 2:25 PM
the one which is in his version on the right side - thing it has no real function, can be move with uis frames, but doesn't stick that way

Ruben

NienorGT
Reply #58 Tuesday, August 14, 2007 4:21 PM

There is no need for a skin author to directly access the UIS code.

I do... It's the best way to compare two skins. And when I'm importing a part from another Skin, I import the picture then copy/pastle the code for instant change, there better way to do it? Also, any Web Developper will check the code itself one time or other even when using a prog like Dreamweaver.

If you want to edit more than one skin, open another copy of SKS6. Think of it like notepad. If you want to edit two txt files you just open a second copy.

But SKS5 where using tabs... tabs are used in Browsers and power utility to replace Explorer (IE: Dopus) and Notepad (IE: PSPad) use tabs... that's why I see that change as a backward move.

The bug analyzing and correction feature in SKS5 was more trouble than it was worth. Frequently it flagged things which were not issues and gave the user the impression that the skin had serious problems. Worse, the correct these errors feature can damage a skin.

Thanks for telling! I didn't know it and I thought I was the problem when it was screwing my skin...

Shellstyles can be edited under the XP specific sections.

I noticed that, but where is the "import" feature to import from a shellstyle.dll after importing a MSStyle?

Thanks for the reply Neil, I appreciate to get in contact with the man behind WB and SKS!


LightStar
Reply #59 Wednesday, August 15, 2007 6:47 PM
Seems to be a problem in the taskbar buttons area, on the horizontals, the states listed in the Help tab and on the pulldowns for changing text values are Normal, Pressed, Disabled, Highlighted, Activated and Activated & Highlighted. On the verticals it is listed as Normal, Pressed, Disabled, Mouse Over and Focus & Default. The vertical mouse over state does not change no matter what you do either. Probably just an oversight, but the vertical states should be exactly the same as the horizontals.

PurrBall
Reply #60 Wednesday, August 15, 2007 8:05 PM
Will there be a Vista-compatible version of SKS5?

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