Thread: Some ideas about simplifying the skin

Skinning CF is really hard and with RC1 the amount of graphics even increased especially concerning the dialogs. Just porting a more or less finished 1.6 skin to rc1 means several days of work and there are some things which could be simplified, I think.
Here are some ideas:

1. why not combine the fm/am-radio and the xm-radio? Having the same layout for fm/am with the list view would be nice anyway because you could name the preset-stations and get a list of stations instead of 8 numbered buttons with 3 stations on each. Just add a third state to the am/fm switch button so you can easily switch between fm, am and xm. As a bonus there is one less screen and one less main-page button occupied.
2. Skinning the Setup was a real pain in older versions, now it is perfect, just one empty page and the two pages with buttons on them, the same thing would be fantastic for all those browser-based dialogs, there are so many of them (2 file-browsers, multiple gps-dialogs, preset-browser, …) with just one or two buttons being different and you not only have to make all those different graphics you also have to code them all in the xml-file. Having just 4-5 basic dialog types (a small one for ok-box and this stuff, one browser-based, a larger one for more buttons, …) would make skinning so much easier.
3. I don’t know how difficult this is to achieve but having transparency support for all graphics (especially dialogs) would give skin-makers many more possibilities.

Just a few thoughts maybe you like some of the ideas.
I’d really appreciate skinning to become easier in the future releases.