SkinStudio 7 tips and tricks
Up is down. That's just maddeningly unhelpful. Why are these things never clear?
Tuesday, June 28, 2011 by k10w3 | Discussion: WindowBlinds Tutorials
"Up is down. That's just maddeningly unhelpful. Why are these things never clear?" -- Captain Jack Sparrow
I'm starting this thread to post all the tricks and code additions that I can think of, (if I miss any, please add to them in this thread), as a central clearing house grocery list of things gleaned from master skins, that aren't so obvious to a new WB skinner when they start out in SKS7.
1. The Show Desktop Button for Windows 7 - add BackgroundEffect=1 to the code.
2. The titlebar buttons glow - add Framecount=1 to the code.
3. Toolbar Buttons:
6 State - Mouseover uses the disabled color. Pressed use the Mouseover color.
Toolbar Style menubar button - Pressed uses the disabled color. Mouseover uses the pressed color.
Places Toolbar Button - Focus uses the Pressed color. Pressed uses the Disabled color.
4. UIS2 Titlebar close button: If you delete all the buttons already in the template and add new ones (as opposed to saving your new ones on top of the ones in the template by using the framebuilder feature in Skin Studio), you need to FIRST save the close button image action as something OTHER than close, apply it, then change the action to close, because there is a glitch in SkinStudio that renders the UIS2 close button nonfunctional if it's saved first as close - per Vampothika's tutorial here: http://wiki.wincustomize.com/images/d/d6/050-UISframes_buttons2.jpg)
That's all I can think of for right now.
Those of you who know of more, please add them! Thanks so much. 
5. Per 2of3: Add a third image to the Start Menu Item Mouseover which will be used in the start menu expanded mode.
6. Per Vampothika:
A. IE Background Navigation Arrow; one of the arrows is 1 pixel out; you need to test it to get it right.
B. For images that run vertically - add vert=1 to the code.
C. Group Box: Copy and paste text code from header section to border section to change color and font.
D. Taskbar group menu: the text codex in menu items has to be copied and pasted into the background codex, to apply mouseover color.
7. Per Lightstar: The search field background and the address field backgrounds for Windows 7 showing and image count of 5 when it should be 4.
8. Tip to newbies: Remember to make a .wba file after every successful skinning session to save a copy of your changes in case you need to revert to the last successful version, in case something gets messed up.
9. Windows 7 Expander, if you're skinning only windows 7 -- you have to skin both the regular expander and the windows 7 expander (in both vertical and horizontal taskbars) so all states of the expander will show up on the vertical taskbar.
10. Edit Controls -->Edit Headerbars-->drop down arrows and ticks-->pressed and mouseover states are transposed (pressed is mouseover and mouseover is pressed). ALSO -- pressed text and mouseover text on the header bar are the same color, which is determined by the pressed text. Mouseover text does not show.
11. Edit Minimized Windows: The glyphs in the minimized window are all screwed up, at least on Windows 7: The normal button is the pressed image, and the mouseover image never shows up.
12. Per Neone6: When Wanting to TILE the Programs list you gotta use "StretchHorizontal middle section" in the Painting margins to get the "Tiling effect".
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Reply #22 Thursday, July 7, 2011 1:35 PM
How about this one, if your WB uses per pixel frames, when you click a link that opens a new window automatically in Firefox, Pale Moon or IE, the window frames when the window opens are classic unless you move the window around or maximize it. I have tried several different WB's, including some of my own, that do this when using per pixel frames. This is on Windows XP x86. Have not checked yet on Vista or Win 7.
Reply #24 Thursday, July 7, 2011 5:13 PM
Must just be on XP. I don't get that in 7. Sounds mighty annoying, though. 
I'm sorry for you.
Reply #26 Thursday, July 7, 2011 10:27 PM
Yes Karen...thanks for doing this. I have the thread bookmarked so I can get at it easily. So much to learn. Whew!
Reply #27 Monday, July 18, 2011 2:21 PM
I found another one today - Headerbars-->drop down arrows and ticks-->pressed and mouseover states are transposed (pressed is mouseover and mouseover is pressed).
Reply #28 Thursday, September 1, 2011 11:34 PM
And here's another one. The glyphs in the minimized window are all screwed up, at least on Windows 7 -- The normal button is the pressed image and the mouseover image never shows up.
Reply #29 Friday, September 2, 2011 12:42 AM
Me and Vampy were talking and started on about the glitches and issues with WindowBlinds 7 and I realized I had one to add to this thread...When Wanting to TILE the Programs list you gotta use "StretchHorizontal middle section" in the Painting margins to get the "Tiling effect"....I´m guessing the states are swapped. 
Reply #31 Wednesday, October 5, 2011 8:15 AM
need a bump to keep it fresh, oh, okay, Happy Halloween.
Reply #32 Tuesday, October 25, 2011 8:44 AM
I have looked into this and this does not seem to be the case. Pretty much all the sections in WB share the same loading and painting code so a swap of the states is not possible and checking here the tile middle section works as expect. Are you sure you had not picked Tile Horz middle section instead?
Reply #33 Tuesday, October 25, 2011 8:47 AM
The mouseover state has never been used, but I see the issue with the painting. The problem is not quite what you thought, it is that the buttons get stuck once they have been pressed. So they show correctly until one of them has been pressed and then in the future they always show as the pressed image. This will require a WB fix as it isn't a SkinStudio issue.
Reply #34 Tuesday, October 25, 2011 8:53 AM
Quoting neone6,
reply 29
Me and Vampy were talking and started on about the glitches and issues with WindowBlinds 7 and I realized I had one to add to this thread...When Wanting to TILE the Programs list you gotta use "StretchHorizontal middle section" in the Painting margins to get the "Tiling effect"....I´m guessing the states are swapped.
I have looked into this and this does not seem to be the case. Pretty much all the sections in WB share the same loading and painting code so a swap of the states is not possible and checking here the tile middle section works as expect. Are you sure you had not picked Tile Horz middle section instead?
Reply #35 Tuesday, October 25, 2011 9:41 AM
Quoting Neil Banfield,
reply 32
Quoting neone6,
reply 29
Me and Vampy were talking and started on about the glitches and issues with WindowBlinds 7 and I realized I had one to add to this thread...When Wanting to TILE the Programs list you gotta use "StretchHorizontal middle section" in the Painting margins to get the "Tiling effect"....I´m guessing the states are swapped.
I have looked into this and this does not seem to be the case. Pretty much all the sections in WB share the same loading and painting code so a swap of the states is not possible and checking here the tile middle section works as expect. Are you sure you had not picked Tile Horz middle section instead?
I´m sorry I have to contradict you Neil, But me and Kitty are looking at SKS as I´m writing this and it says clearly "Stretch horizontal middle section"...And it´s tiling like I wanted it to. It´s on Programslist for Blacklight Rebel if it will help or show something for you....
I have looked and it seems there is code in WB to handle a common skinner error that showed up with high dpi setups. WB is removing the tile flag automatically on skin load to work around these bad skins IF the image width is exactly the same as the part width value. (set on the extra settings page - the Vista sections override the others if defined)
The same is true of the places list section.
Reply #36 Tuesday, October 25, 2011 11:06 AM
The same is true of the places list section.
Reply #37 Tuesday, October 25, 2011 11:11 AM
Quoting Neil Banfield,
reply 35
I have looked and it seems there is code in WB to handle a common skinner error that showed up with high dpi setups. WB is removing the tile flag automatically on skin load to work around these bad skins IF the image width is exactly the same as the part width value. (set on the extra settings page - the Vista sections override the others if defined)
The same is true of the places list section.Wait...what? This is not clear to me. What is the common skin error that people are making? And isn't the image width supposed to be the same as the part width value?
If the width matched the size then people didn't bother to set the tile settings which caused a problem on a high dpi machine as the image would tile instead of stretching as it should do in that case.
Reply #40 Tuesday, October 25, 2011 2:35 PM
I had noticed some of these points but I learn a lot of tricks !
thanks for sharing Karen 
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Reply #21 Monday, July 4, 2011 2:25 PM
I just discovered another one -- if you're skinning for only windows 7, you have to skin BOTH the regular expander and the windows 7 expander in order to get all states of the expander to show up on the vertical taskbar.