hAv1c+ v3.02 - the fastest and most stable RR skin - v4 coming very soon!

**monkeyracer** · 08-11-2008, 05:09 PM

Originally Posted by treetop777

Photoshop PSD's? I could swear you did 'em in paint or some other program.

Looks good. I'll wait for V3 with all the tweaks before updating again, WHEW!

I'm not sure whether to take that as a compliment or not.

I've always used PS for my skins, except for the fabled "MS Paint" skin, but that was concept only.

With PS, I can make sure everything lines up correctly, and apply the button bevels, and keep the transparency. There are very few .psd's for this skin, and V3 will only have maybe 4 or 5 different .psd's.

I'm playing around with a few ideas for v3, nothing major, but there might be different screen shots posted that will probably not make it into v3...

Also, thinking about adding the RRmedia plugin, maybe.

**treetop777** · 08-11-2008, 05:48 PM

Originally Posted by monkeyracer

I'm not sure whether to take that as a compliment or not.

It's neither

reading it again i see where it could be misunderstood.

**monkeyracer** · 08-11-2008, 06:43 PM

I think that I'm going to take it as a compliment anyway, because if I did this in Paint, then I gotta be good.

The whole point of this skin is to be easy to read in direct sunlight, nice and solid, lightweight, and consistent to keep it safe to use while driving. The other current popular skins have a lot of features, but there's some day to day usability lost in that concept. The fonts are large and clear, the buttons are in the same location in as many screens as possible. There are music controls on every screen, and the menu and back are in the same corners as almost every single windows app.

A lot of the changes I am making to it are a result of finally being able to test this in the car. I've kept the background black with white text, and when the sun is in the worst position, I can still read the screen (no-transflective screen here.) On bumpy roads, having the buttons touch the edge helps a lot. If this all means that I have to sacrifice a little graphic appeal, that's ok. I hardly look at it (you know, since I'm driving, rather than staring at my cool graphics), so having graphic appeal means nothing to me.

**goldenley** · 08-12-2008, 03:02 AM

ok, after changing the general.ini file, it seems fine. The streching isn't big enough to be an issue. The GPS strecthed fine, too, but I don't have it embedded, so that may be the difference.

There is one thing that's been annoying me that I've been trying to troubleshoot. I use my desktop to test different settings and skins before taking them out to my carPC. Normally there's no difference, but for some reason my desktop displays the speed gauge just fine (although it's stuck at 0 since my computer's not hooked up to a GPS unit) while my carPC just displays a big white rectangle where the album art and speed gauge should be. Clicking the white rectangle does nothing. Both the carPC and the desktop have the latest version of flash (9.0.124.0). It works on the desktop in both 800x480 and x600, and it doesn't work on the carPC in either resolution. Any suggestions on what to try to get the speed gauge working? I don't use album art, but a speed gauge would look a lot nicer than a white block.

I really like this skin (very intuitive and compact) and really want to get it working smoothly.

**monkeyracer** · 08-12-2008, 09:22 AM

The GPS that doesn't stretch is the buttons that are overlaid on top of the GPS, In the v3 release, I will have a set of 800x600 overlays for those that use that resolution.

As far as the flash is concerned, try to open the wh_speedo.swf file. It should load in internet explorer. If it doesn't, then there is an issue with flash on that machine.

Guino did a write up about the flash player v9 and the white box issue maybe try the stuff in that link and see if that helps.

**monkeyracer** · 08-12-2008, 11:14 AM

teaser with gas price screen:

Still trying to figure out the sliders, there's not a really great place for them, some screens have room for the songpos, but not all, which would be ideal...

**goldenley** · 08-12-2008, 06:48 PM

awesome, fixed it to show the gauge correctly. Took me a while to split the GPS port correctly so both RR and iGuidance received the GPS info stream, but everything looks good now.

**goldenley** · 08-13-2008, 09:29 PM

Even though the speed gauge worked, it felt really laggy even after trying all the tips to get flash to display smoothly, so I scrapped it. I also felt having the song scroll along the bottom and displayed on the home menu was a bit redundant so I only kept the bottom scroll. I'm a little strange because I organize my songs by file name instead of tags, so this menu.skin wouldn't be good for most people (althogh it's easy to change it back).

After some tweaking I got something with a little different feel on the home menu. Since I don't pay for a city wide wireless internet account, I felt an internet indicator would be useful. I'm not sure I put it in the best place, but it's small enough it doesn't really get in the way. Most of it is just stuff that I'm interested in that other people may not be so interested in (lat/lon, altitude, #satellites, CPU&MEM load). I guess the date in long format and the internet indicator are what would appeal most to other people.

This is the first time I've tried my hand at any RR skin editing. I think it looks fairly clean since I had a good structure to build off of and I wasn't doing anything overly complicated. Just thought I'd share how I bastardized your creation

edit: I've also attached a screenshot to show what it looks like on my system. If I was connected to the internet, "wifi" would show in small letters below and to the left of the 'C' in CPU load. And to save you the trouble, somewhere on Illinois st. Golden, CO.

**monkeyracer** · 08-13-2008, 11:10 PM

With V3, Almost all of the labels you put in the screenshot are going to be selectable from a menu or by pressing the area where the labels are. There will also be a better 800x600 version released.

Your gps antenna and RR only update at a 1hz interval (once per second) and that's why it's laggy. This is both a hardware and software issue, and there's not really a good way to get around it.

You can tell by my gas prices screen shot approx where I am (1.7 miles from 350 s union...) Nice to see someone from around here.

**goldenley** · 08-14-2008, 12:24 AM

Originally Posted by monkeyracer

With V3, Almost all of the labels you put in the screenshot are going to be selectable from a menu or by pressing the area where the labels are. There will also be a better 800x600 version released.

Your gps antenna and RR only update at a 1hz interval (once per second) and that's why it's laggy. This is both a hardware and software issue, and there's not really a good way to get around it.

You can tell by my gas prices screen shot approx where I am (1.7 miles from 350 s union...) Nice to see someone from around here.

haha, I don't know about you, but I have to have something to keep me busy when it's not ski season! I'm looking forward to the v3 800x600 release. I'm not competent enough to resize and move everything around so it looks native.

I'll probably keep playing with it. Maybe I'll put the speed gauge back in the center and take out the lat/lon. Actually, I thought I saw a thread with a collection of flash animations. I think I'll try to find a compass to replace the speed gauge. I don't know why, but I've always found something very satisfying about programming in notepad.

Thread: hAv1c+ v3.02 - the fastest and most stable RR skin - v4 coming very soon!

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