What's this?
It is a fully functioning skin, but with a special feature.
It is intended to be helpful in creating a MusicBee skin.
Both for experienced skinners, and for users that want to take their first shot at designing their own skin.
Usually skinning is a bit of a masochistic endeavour.
Ploughing through up to 400 lines of elements, each containing variations of bg, fg and bdr attributes is not always fun.
And it's not always obvious where and how the element in question will show up exactly.
For this skin I have looked at what elements could be 'partnered together', and created single variables for them.
Each variable only has one rgb value that you need to set.
So when opening the .xml with an editor to edit it, instead of the need to sift through some 400 lines containing more than 800 rgb values, you only need to edit some 130 lines containing one single rgb value.
If you open the xml file, somewhere at the beginning you will see a list of designated skinning variables under <variables>
Each of these variables controls one or more elements that exist under <colours>.
In principle you only need to edit these variables, and simply ignore all elements under <colours>.
That (in general) will give pretty good results already.
In many cases probably even better compared to creating a skin by editing every single element and rgb attribute manually.
If the results after having set all variable values are not completely satisfactory for some specific skin elements, or if you e.g. would like to add gradients to some elements, next you can also edit the elements under the <colours> tree. Just as you would do in a 'normal' xml skin file.
Then just replace the variable names following the original element name to the desired rgb value. (replace the variable name right after bg=, fg= etc.)
download Chameleon DNA
Chameleon DNA also has a faster friend.
See the next post to read about him.
Topic: Chameleon DNA & Cheetah DNA (skin creation tools) (Read 8227 times)