Advisor Tutorial Skin Project

[MixMan]

You can now download the first release of "Advisor Tutorial Skin", a skin project that is no ordinary skin. It has 6 skins in 1 skin....a "SixPack" of tutorial skins. There is also a Tutorial Guide.....thats intended for Graphic Designers

I have now released the AdVisor Tutorial Skins in the Wiki/Skin Development
http://gbpvr.com/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Development/Skin

It has no actual design, except for the sub menu skins. It is more or less a naming standard for the Image files and flexible BaseSkin.xml to allow many different "Themes" of the skin.
The names for the images has not been finalized yet, so they might change.

The main idea is to use the BaseSkin.xml functionality and the use of Images as much as
possible. This would make it very easy for a graphical designer to make a skin design. I have made a "grid framework" to make positioning of elements easier.

I have studied other skins and incorperated the best ideas I have found. I would like to use "Themes" with modified versions of Blue, BlueMCE2 and Countour in the upcoming release of "Advisor Tutorial Skin" if that is OK with the designers.


Key features for skin
- Good written documentation of how to make a "Skin Design"
- Buttons wide enough for different languages.
- Space around graphical object to "allow" design
- Most common "Text Styles" in BaseSkin.xml
- Easy to have different Main Menus and graphical style

[gruskada]

I have started a ""tutorial" skin project, that is no ordinary skin.
...
- Good written documentation of how to make a "Skin Design"
...

I'm eagerly awaiting this. You may want to take a look at my post concerning tags and attributes, if you haven't already, and perhaps we can help each other out.

As I've mentioned before, I definitely want to include your work in SkinTools - probably as one of the default selectable skin templates, alongside Blue.

gruskada

[MixMan]

Hi

Some skins are tricky to skin because there are so many dependencies.
Recordings and FM radio are the worst to skin.

My wishes to Sub for modification of skinning are:

Possibility to from within BaseSkin.xml, position the "ScreenName" in the Sub menus.

Make "global" NamedColors in BaseSkin.xml

Make DetailsView in FM Radio "skinnable" with Images.

The Advisor skin is something that will evolve, since I am moving more sub skin common things textstyles and hopefully NamedColors to BaseSkin, so changing "styles" will be really easy.
I have come pretty far now, almost all GBPVR sub skins are done. Testing with languages and adjusting widths here and there is left to do.

[sub]

MixMan has been doing a lot of good work on these skin templates, and on multi-language support, and helping me with the screen layout. I'll be adopting his suggested layouts for future releases, and I encourage people designing their own skins to also take look. My previous 'blue' was awkward when it came to multi-language support, with quite a few translations being too long for the buttons. These new sizing are only be minor tweaks, but things like slightly longer buttons etc were really needed.

I'll also be including his language files in the distribution, and include a setting in the config app to switch between them, making multi-lingual skin considerations more important than ever.

[sub]

Make "global" NamedColors in BaseSkin.xml

Make DetailsView in FM Radio "skinnable" with Images.

These are done for the next build.

[MixMan]

Thanks Sub

By the way.....I haven' found a way to position the "NoItems" in the recordings menu.
It woud be great if those text strings could be positioned.

That sounds great with global NamedColors, that will make it easy to have common backgrounds for popups that are found here and there.
It will make Style changing a lot easier.

I downloaded Old_Mans Appearence Manager a month ago, but i didn't get it to work the first time. But the idea with transparent mask was good, so that is a part of the Advisor Sub Menu skin.....as an option for designers.
The Advisor skin will have all common bitmaps in the skin root.
I hope that you will like the naming of the bitmaps....but thats something that we can discuss....perhaps.
The Advisor Tutorial Skin ..... is not really a skin design, but hopefully a BaseSkin "standard" that shall evolve in time. I hope designers will find it useful.

[Torque]

That's fine if you want to use my Contour skin as an example, but I'm still fuzzy on what you're trying to accomplish.

I'm not very good with graphics programs in contrast to others on this board, so I tailored Contour's appearance mostly with xml (everything but the background and logos are done with xml). It sounds like what you're wanting to do is make up the entire appearance with images.

It sounds like a good idea for the graphical designers, but I'm more happy that maybe the individual plugin's skin requirements might be more standardized, which will make it easier for guys like me in the end

Good luck with your project!

[Old Dog]

It has no actual design, just a naming standard for the Image files

The Appearance Manager had to define some standard names and locations for various images.

Some people have expressed interest in seeing the AM applied to other skins.

Are we going to suffer two "standards"?

-David

[MixMan]

The first Alpha release of the skin tutorial is ready.
You can download the "skin" from this link. (Upload does not work)
http://startop.homeftp.net/advisor_tutorial.zip

Read document README FIRST.RTF in skin root

Please give feedback and ideas.

[Old Dog]

What is your compelling justification for introducing new standard files names for the background layer image files, the motif layer image files, and the button image files?

I will follow up later, when time permits, with compelling reasons for not making these changes.