ways to make gbpvr prettier

[McBainUK]

gruskada - do you have any specs / goals drawn up already? Need to know what the software needs to do!? In other words what is the hard thing about developing skins that the program could help with?

Been thinking about this most of the day Thinking of an IDE / web developer style program. Has a list of Colors, TextStyles, ComositeImages, SpecialElements etc and allows the designer to edit their properties, while previewing them in a picture box. At the mo I'm looking in to how the skining system works...currently how SpecialElements and ComositeImages are linked. Bit of a mission as skins/plugins makers all have differences

Any thoughts?

ps I've been coding for about 6yrs, firstly Basic then Visual Basic, Java and since last september, C# and .net. Never been involved in a multi-developer project (yet).

[gruskada]

I think the way to go would be to extend the GBPVR Widget Library.

That combined with something like this, with a "Save Skin" option would be a great start, I think.

gruskada

[wedgie]

why don't you make an extension for dreamweaver???
just thought.

[gruskada]

Thinking of an IDE / web developer style program. Has a list of Colors, TextStyles, ComositeImages, SpecialElements etc and allows the designer to edit their properties, while previewing them in a picture box

I'm thinking of something very similar, like the excellent forms designer in Visual Studio. My biggest goals would be for a skin designer to not have to touch any code, see changes as they make them, and not to be at risk for harming their own GBPVR setup.

As far as plugins handling things differently, that could definitely be a problem. I wonder if there's any way we could extract how each plugin handles the inerface by the dll? It would be neat if you could just drop the plugin's dll file into a directory, and the app could pull the necessary information about how it works out of it. I haven't gotten very far with my Sport Scores plugin (I'm still at the parsing stage), so I really don't know how any of this works yet.

Another thought - if there's a "best practices" for developing plugins, perhaps we should only support that. That way, plugins that followed this setup would have a higher liklihood of being skinned faster by skinners, and would hopefully in turn entice people to use the best practices.

gruskada

[gruskada]

why don't you make an extension for dreamweaver???
just thought.

I don't own Dreamweaver, and I'm not sure it could handle this type of thing, anyway (I could be wrong...)

gruskada

[McBainUK]

As far as plugins handling things differently, that could definitely be a problem. I wonder if there's any way we could extract how each plugin handles the inerface by the dll? It would be neat if you could just drop the plugin's dll file into a directory, and the app could pull the necessary information about how it works out of it.

Don't think this would be possible as its basically de-compiling a program (bad). I've looked into how plugins use skins and the format of skin.xml. Will post my results tomorow (getting late now)

----------------
I've decided to start 'bottom up'. Here is the source for a demo of the skin classes (incl CompositeImage,CompositeElement and SpecialElement). You can see how I think these parts work together in a skin.

Can you think of some features / goals? Ideas currently are:

• A file manger showing all skin.xml's the dev is working on.
  
• A common libary so the skin dev can just add a standard "button" skin to the skin (just need to supply the special element name).
  
• Common libary for textstyles / colors - this would make it easier to implement a style/theme for skin.
  

Will post again tomorow

[McBainUK]

Also you said you've done windows forms dev? Could be useful for the UI as not done much .net forms myself, mostly VB6.

The code I've wrote focuses on the data within the program / classes. Obviously a big section of the program would be the save/load/read/write of xml files. I have never done this using code.

[gruskada]

Let's move this part of the thread over to the "Developers" area...

http://forums.nextpvr.com/showthread.php...#post86994

gruskada