Plugin developers read

[Old Dog]

The day the My Series "just works" with whatever skin I want to use will be a happy day indeed.

daphatty,

I just skinned My Music & My Videos for Plain Jane. So how bad a job did I do?

Regards,
Old Dog

[Torque]

daphatty,

I just skinned My Music & My Videos for Plain Jane. So how bad a job did I do?

Regards,
Old Dog

I think that's the point of this thread. IMO, we shouldn't have to skin every plugin. The plugin should be designed to use the definitions from the baseskin file (common location and look for buttons, dialog boxes, ...)

This is the main reason I haven't worked on any more skins. I don't have the time or patience to go thru every plugin to make it work with a new skin and I'd rather not put out a skin that looks great for the main menu but rubbish for whatever plugins the user wishes to use.

[Old Dog]

I think that's the point of this thread. IMO, we shouldn't have to skin every plugin. The plugin should be designed to use the definitions from the baseskin file (common location and look for buttons, dialog boxes, ...)

This is the main reason I haven't worked on any more skins. I don't have the time or patience to go thru every plugin to make it work with a new skin and I'd rather not put out a skin that looks great for the main menu but rubbish for whatever plugins the user wishes to use.

I'm a little skeptical that this can be accomplished without dampening creativity.

[Torque]

I'm a little skeptical that this can be accomplished without dampening creativity.

Creativity for plugin designers or skinners?

If the plugins would carry over at the very least the common background, button look, and font styles/sizes, dialog box appearances then that might be enough. But unless things have changed recently, most of them do not.

Skinners can still move things around in the individual skin.xml files if they feel they want to. But lets take a few plugins for my example: Weather, Stocks, and Search. All three have the same basic format and I haven't seen a skin yet that changes the way they look drastically... the buttons always run down the left side with the data sitting to the right and some sort of indication along the top that tells which plugin you're viewing (i.e., "Weather"). Well, if these plugins were to reference (by default) locations and style for buttons, screenname, data area, and notes area, creating a skin would be an easier feat.

1/2 of my full time job is doing web programming. From a single stylesheet, I can change the look and feel for every existing page of a web site and know that any new pages can be added with little to no work so they fit in with the rest of the site exactly. What I hope the baseskin file will do eventually.

[McBainUK]

But this is the web, and Windows for that matter, is made up of standard UI elements defined by the OS/browser (buttons, links, header text, all form type elements for examples). This is not the case with GBPVR.

[sub]

True, but I agree with Torque. Being able to define background, button look, colours, and font styles/sizes, and having the rest picked up from the standard skin goes a long way towards improving the skinning.

In the past 95% of all skins were pretty much the exactly same, with only different buttons and backgrounds being changed, but it took the developers a lot of hard work having to edit every XML file to achieve this. I'm hoping a quick edit of baseskin.xml will achieve the same thing in future.

[Fatman_do]

Review post #1 and #10 of this thread.

Nothing stated there hinders creativity or makes it a magic bullet that cures all problems. I see both those posts outlining a vast improvement with no negatives.

With versioning included, obsolete skins (due to major plugin changes) can be allowed to fall back to newer ones in blue.

It would be great for users, skinners, and plugin developers if many of the troubleshooting issues didn't have to be answered by:

"I recommend switching back to the default Blue skin until your skin of choice has been updated for compatibility with this new release."

[McBainUK]

In the past 95% of all skins were pretty much the exactly same, with only different buttons and backgrounds being changed, but it took the developers a lot of hard work having to edit every XML file to achieve this. I'm hoping a quick edit of baseskin.xml will achieve the same thing in future.

True. Looking forward to the next update, be good to see how far skiners/plugin devs can go with the baseskin approach. ETA sub?

[sub]

Its probably about a month until v0.98. I'm currently in the middle of development of some of it's features.

[Old Dog]

I'm a little skeptical that this can be accomplished without dampening creativity.

Perhaps I should rephrase that:
I'm a little curious to see if this can be accomplished without dampening creativity.

-Bad Dog