Thread: Fist screen-shot of V3 with a Skin

The "sliver of pink" is because you have non-fuschia colors near the edges. PhotoShop alpha-blends the fuscia background with the edges of the buttons. Just zoom into the edges and make sure you use all fuschia or all {button-color}... don't blend the two.

Note: Attached image is a BMP just renamed to JPG so the board would let me upload it.

Is there anyway to not have photoshop blend the edges?? When i make my images...it is 2 layers...one layer in the pink and the top layer is the button..so i dont know how photoshop would blend those 2? What photo software are u using?

I used PhotoShop 7. I don't know much about using PhotoShop though. I opened the PNG's for the brushed metal and brushed aluminum skins. I then selected the parts I wanted with the magic wand tool and then zoomed it and fine-touched it with the rectangle tool. Then I pasted them on to a fuschia background and saved them as BMP. If you see "pink" around the edjes, then the "pink" you are seeing is not the exact same shade of "pink" as the rest of the background. Just zoom way into the edges and use the pencil tool to replace all the "visable pink" with the "invisable pink" color.

Update:

Progress is going really good on V3. I think I should be able to get a release out by the end of this week. I'm almost done with the new skinning. Then I just have to work out some embedding bugs/smoothness issues, add some simple features (play click sound, partial window name match, etc.), finnish the base iG skin, do some testing with Ol33l's help, and then it will be ready.

What's next: I've already been working a bit on adding Ol33l's zoom component to Sb. I've also been looking at using PNG files rather than BMPs. I am totally excited about PNG because it can do partial-transparancy (alpha-blending) which will allow me to make semi-transparent buttons that look like etched glass overlaid on the map. I think that will look hella sweet. Eventually I would like to do animation so buttons can slide on/off the map and/or have animated icons in the buttons (unfortunatly PNG doesn't support animation like GIF).

Anyway, I expect V3 to need some bugs worked out of it, but its feature set will rock. Hopfully PhotoShop people will be able understand the new skinning format and expand upon my base iG skin to create some really good skins for many different apps. V3.1 will add zoom, maybe PNG, and fix any reported bugs in V3. After that I will be taking a break for a while, but I do plan on slowly continuing work on SKINbedder and will probably make my own front-end out of it in a year or so (I've learned a ton about API and graphics doing Sb, so now I can put that together with my UI-design and database knowledge to make a really powerful music/video/movie/TV player unlike anything currently available).

? ...modderButt (as well as my TSkinLayer) use TBitmap, not TImage. I believe TBitmaps are the base class you need to draw with. It seems that any other format needs to be converted to TBitmap for use with Canvas.Draw(0,0,BMP) and/or Canvas.CopyRect(...). I may be able to use PNGDraw(...) or something like that, but I didn't look in to it much because I was trying not to get distracted with PNG until the BMPs were done first.

However, it seems I cannot get the BMPs transparent unless I cut the transparent parts out of the clickable area as well (as modderBut does). I was trying just to use:

TBitmap.TransparentColor := clFuchsia;
TBitmap.TransparentMode := tmFixed;

Then I found out I forgot about:
TBitmap.Transparent := True;

...but now I just added that and it is still not working. I think I need to do something special in the components TSkinLayer.Draw(...). Still working on it...

Ok, now using PNG. Still having refresh problems though

Hey PD. The container (based on TComponent) has it's StyleEX set to EX_TRANSPARENT (not EX_LAYERED) in the create-params override.

Here's the problem (both with multiple different ways to make the BMPs transparent, and now with the TPNGObject I am using instead):

When it first loads, there is black behind the components rect. The fuchsia is cut out of the image, but it's like something filled my rect with a black brush first. I have tried the setting the brush.style to bsClear trick with no luck. After the map redraws itself (in response to pushing one of the 4 buttons) the black is gone but my buttons are also invisible (you can still click them and if you do you can see the one you clicked while the mouse is down, until the map redraws itself again). The thing is, if you minimize the would program and then restore it at any time, it will always look perfect (until you click a button again). When you restore it calls the .paint procedure. However, if I call .refresh or .repaint from my program, the black background shows up again just like when it first loads. Once again, a quick minimize and restore always fixes it.

What can I do in my code to simulate restoring the window. I have tried to .repaint and .refresh every component and every canvas I can find, and it still doesn't work right... only a minimize and restore looks right.

Note: If I click the menu button, it looks right while the main-menu is open, but as soon as I click "Map View" to exit the main menu the buttons disappear again.