Author Topic: Sample Skin  (Read 57316 times)

hiccup

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What is this?

It is a MusicBee skin, but it's not intended as an end-user skin, but as a tool for both novice and experiences skinners.

Every colour appearing in this skin is unique and used only once.
This makes it possible to 'eye-drop' or 'color-pick' any part of the skin, and then use that rgb value to easily locate the corresponding element in the skin xml.

It was inspired by the great 'dummy skin' by lminente, but since that one hasn't been updated after it's release many years ago, I created my own personal version a while back. But it was not very complete or fully reliable, so I never shared it.

But recently I managed to complete it and more thoroughly test it, and by now it works quite well. So I thought to publish it.

Apart from the 'colour-picking' feature, there are some other features to be aware of, or that could be made use of:

- It has been stripped of all obsolete and pre- MB v3 elements that I could find.
- It should contain all elements up to the most recent MusicBee version (currently 3.2.6675 3.5.8470)

This means it's also intended as some sort of a reference skin. So if you find elements in your own skin that are not in this one, my intention is that it should be safe for you to remove those elements from your skin. And so preventing wasting time on dis-functional and obsolete elements.
But of course, removing such elements is at your own risk. That this works well for me, doesn't mean it's 100% reliable. And if you need full backwards compatibility with MB v2.x it's probably wise not to touch those at all.

- It should also be quite reliable in relation to the presence or absence of 'fg', 'bg', 'bdr' attributes for each element.
  (although I can not guarantee this, since this is not very well documented anywhere else)

- Even-though all elements in this skin were matched against the list of elements that Steven recently provided, I couldn't get a lot of them working.
 This could be either because I missed some spots, because they are just obsolete, or perhaps because they are there for backward compatibility with pre- MB v3.0 skins.
 I have given all those elements the rgb value of '0,255,0'. It might be safe to remove those elements from your own skins. (e.g. in case you have no interest in supporting pre- MB v3 versions)
But again, do that at your own risk. I can't guarantee for 100% that they are obsolete or dysfunctional.

- Even-though this skin is made up with some 'fantasy colour' design, it is very functional.
 It's probably even more useful than most other skins to get a view and a sense of what would be possible to adjust or create by skinning, and will also give a good sense of 'how things work' with all these elements.

- When colour-picking a font, Windows's cleartype will probably make that a bit difficult for you. (unless you have disabled cleartype completely)
 But if you pick the wider horizontal part of a letter (E, F, Z, L, T are good letters for this) you should get the correct rgb value:

  

(I myself am using ICP (Instant Color Picker) for this, and have it configured so that it automatically pastes the rgb value of a clicked colour to Windows' clipboard. That's very handy.)

download Sample Skin
Last Edit: March 24, 2023, 06:35:38 PM by hiccup

Alumni

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Great idea, hiccup! I wish I had something like this when I first started skinning, would have saved me lots of trial and error. As a side note, I would strongly encourage any novice skinners to use global variables whenever possible.
Last Edit: July 10, 2017, 08:14:10 AM by Alumni

hiccup

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updated, added a missing element

Bee-liever

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Nice work.
Thanks very much for doing this!
Much easier on the eyes than the old 'dummy skin' as well.
MusicBee and my library - Making bee-utiful music together

redwing

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I have given all those elements the rgb value of '0,255,0'. It might be safe to remove those elements from your own skins. (e.g. in case you have no interest in supporting pre- MB v3 versions)
But do that at your own risk. I can't guarantee for 100% that they are obsolete.

@users of this tool;
I wouldn't remove them as lots of them are currently working and your skin might not work properly without them.

@hiccup;
I'd provide a unique value for each of 0,255,0 too. Then even when you fail to spot its effect, the user could be benefited because some elements are working only under specific settings, conditions, with/without specific elements/attributes, and that's the real value of this kind of tools just as the dummy skin does. And if the attribute actually does nothing, providing a unique value won't do any harm. Just my 2 cents.

hiccup

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@users of this tool;
I wouldn't remove them as lots of them are currently working and your skin might not work properly without them.

@hiccup;
I'd provide a unique value for each of 0,255,0 too.

After I get the first reports of 'greenies' (0,255,0) showing up under v3.1 I might consider that.
Otherwise it would be a useless exercise.

redwing

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Unbelievable...

Then just try this one. Hide header bar, and tell me what's the bg of the tabs bar.

hiccup

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Unbelievable...

..., and tell me what's the bg of the tabs bar.

So your long absence hasn't cured you from your arrogance.
I'll just ignore you again just like before. Please do the same.

redwing

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Unbelievable...

..., and tell me what's the bg of the tabs bar.

So your long absence hasn't cured you from your arrogance.
I'll just ignore you again just like before. Please do the same.

Sorry but I don't get it. Why am I arrogant, not you?

hiccup

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Oh, I see this topic was made sticky.
That makes it slightly more official now.

If anybody uses this skin, and finds oddities or irregularities, please report the specifics here.
I'll follow this thread and will do my best to improve on this skin where possible.




hiccup

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updated

The previous release had a defect that broke the player panel and the skinned Windows borders.

hiccup

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