A summary of skins would be nice

[jam_zhou]

Hi All,

I've been reading a lot about the latest developments in the skins department and I'm very excited. I'm somewhat confused as to how they all link together if they do.

We've got:
Appearance Manager
BaseSkins
Chameleon

As well as each individual skin.

I feel that lots of people are working on skins with some great overlap.

Can the skin developers somehow summarized what's happened in the last few months?

Thanks.
Jam.z

[Fatman_do]

First of all, Appearance manager is a plugin not a skin, you probably mean Blue-AM.

I am currently the creator of Chameleon. I started this skin with the idea of creating a skin that looked like blue, but then the user can use Appearance Manager to make it look like other skins and much more. It's intention is to be an active, ever changing skin. The user can change as much or as little as they wish. I also am trying to use ideas on the build new main skin ideas thread from several months ago. One of those is to use larger fonts where possible.

The bad news is that I may have to abandon this soon for reasons I will post on the Chameleon thread.

Blue-AM is Old dog's effort to take Blue, and make it Appearance Manager compliant. Nothing more nothing less (for now at least due to his schedule). I am sure he can correct me on this if this is not the case.

BaseSkin is Mixman's project wrapped around his skin Advisor tutorial method. It has lesser Appearance manager functionality and will mostly use downloadable themes that the user installs to more dramatically change its appearance.

All three are different approaches, with different potential. Chameleon is closer to Blue-AM, but is "Blue" with "improvements". Baseskin appears to offer the user a one-step option to totally change the skin.

There is some overlap here in development. Maybe one day there will be no difference.

Of course, Chameleon would not exsist without the help and input of Old Dog and MixMan.

p.s. My favorite so far is Contour by Torque (I used it up until I started my skin).

I talk too much.

[Old Dog]

As Fatman_do said, Blue-AM is Blue with Appearance Manager support. Nothing more, nothing less. I have no plans to enhance Blue-AM. It is ment to be a starter for new skin development with Appearance Manager support from the begining.

Appearance Manager is a plugin that allows the end user to change the look of a skin, on the fly, using a remote control. A very wide range of "looks" can be presented by a single skin. The Collection skin has over 10,000 combinations of "looks" when used with Appearance Manager. Most of the on the fly changes in The Collection focus on the Main Menu. In addition to the Main menu, the buttons used in all of the xml files have been replaced with graphics image files so that the look of these dynamic elements can also be altered on the fly.

Plain Jane is a new member of The Collection series. The main effort in Plain Jane was to remove all of the static graphics from all of the skin's xml files. Now all of the static graphics (title bars, shaded regions for blocks of text or lists, logos, etc.) are implemented in sets of Skin Effect files. Each set includes a skin effect file for each xml file. When Jane is undressed from all of her graphics , you have a very plain skin. Using Appearance Manager and your remote control, you can dress Jane with new backgrounds, static skin elements, and dynamic skin elemenets (buttons, selector bars, indicators, etc.). Like The Collection there can be many combinations, but with Jane the different themes will run all the way through the skin, not just the main menu.

In the near future, Appearance Manager will be enhanced to allow on the fly language selection.

I think thats it for me.

Best Regards,
David