SkinCrafter Licensing Tips and FAQ.

We have a number of questions about SkinCrafter licensing.
So let me clarify and state everything about pricing.

First of all you may find a price table at http://skincrafter.com/order.html
You will see all licensing options and prices there.

SkinCrafter Corporate Source Code License is not listed as it is not freely sold. We require an established communication with corporations who purchase the source codes from us.

Here are some frequently asked questions:

Q. I have two computers and I will do the development on both of them but I will be the only developer. What license do I need?
A. Single Developer License is what you need, as SkinCrafter licensing is per-developer-based

Q. I have a project of mine nad from time to time I'm hiring one or two additional developers. What is my licensing case?
A. 4 Developer Team License is what you need. Note the price is just twice larger than a Single Developer License

Q. I have found a lot of nice skins in your Skins Gallery, how much do they cost? Do you sell them in a bundle?
A. No, no bundle sales are available. All skins might be used for free by all SkinCrafter licensed customers. Moreover, our customers can modify the skins and create their own basing on the existing skins. However if anyone needs the graphics of those skins or maybe a personal design development please feel free to contact our user interface design agency

Q. What's Maintenance? Why do I need it?
A. Maintenance ensures you in a priority of your questions answering and issues resolution over other customers.

Let me know if you think there are other questions to be answered here.

UserData - what is this feature about?

UserData has been added in SkinCrafter v2.0.
But it looks like it still remains to be an unknown feature.

Well, let's try to define why was this functional implemented and when it may come in hand.

What's the application skin?

It's the assembled graphics or images with an appropriate settings used for applications controls skinning. By changing the skin you will change the appearance of standard controls in the application.

The above is pretty clear and simple.

Here is the case, you do develop the music player with avi file played at the splash screen while launching the player.
If you would offer your customers several skins you probably would like to play different avi files at the splash, depending on the style and the color of the skin, right?
Well, that's what UserData was developed for. You may create UserData entry in each of your skins, and put different avi files in there.
Just extract the avi at runtime from currently selected skin and play it. Your splash-screen video will be skin-dependable.

Another example.

Among standard controls you may use some 3rd party components, like Infragistics, ComponentOne or etc..
SkinCrafter will not be able to skin them as they are completely owner drawn.
However, such cool components offer a wide range of customization options and you may just tune them with the overall skin theme via setting proper colors.
Well, again that's where you may use UserData. You may create an entry for each color setting, or integrate a xml or ini file with all color settings in the skin.

I hope this will shed some light on UserData feature.

Also, you may download our UserData demo:

In it we used ini file for controls sizes and positions in each skin. Animations and music files are skin dependable (they are different in each skin)
All this was put into UserData section and was used inside the code.

Right, it's not a feature for designers.. But we do sell the component for developers, so UserData should be a good weapon in your arsenal.

Let me hear any questions. I'd be glad to explain this more.

Skins And MS Visual Studio 2005 Redisribution

There is a known problem with redistribution of non-dotNet\VC++ applications developed in VS 2005.

It's not enough to supply the required dlls, as at some points your application will still fail to launch on a fresh installations of Windows OS.

The only workaround for this situation is to deploy "Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 Redistributable Package" with your installation.

SkinCrafter engine is written in VC++, and since version 3.0 SkinCrafter ActiveX will be built in VS 2005 too.

Therefore, it's highly recommended to bare in mind the fact of MS VC++ Redist Package dependency when upgrading and deploying your products.

One more note, there are two versions of VC++ Redistribution package available at Microsoft website:

1) Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 Redistributable Package
2) Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 SP1 Redistributable Package

We will use the latest SP1 version.

Standard and custom skins

What is the difference between sandard and custom skins?

Standard skin includes a full set of more then 20 standard controls supported by SkinCrafter engine:

• Window's frame, Title bar and Title bar buttons
• MDI windows
• Push button
• Radio button
• Check box
• Push-like checkboxes and radio button
• Scrollbars
• Menu bar
• Popup Menu
• Toolbar
• Tab conrol
• Progress bar
• Status bar
• Resize grip
• ListboxList control
• Tree control
• Dropdown/combo box
• Groupbox
• Header control
• DateTime
• PickerMonthCalendar
  

If these controls are filled with images and all your controls are skinned when this skin applied, then you are dealing with standard skin!

If you need a skin for your music player or cd burning utility, or web search anilizer or anything else, where the control buttons or other controls should have different appearence. Then you need a custom skin.

Custom skins do not depend on any templates, they usually are just drawn in graphics editor and should be cut into the skin, transforming the particular parts of drawn UI into the controls. This is what is refered when talking about custom skins.

Examles:

Standard skin:

[Skinastic]

Custom skin:

[VT Phone]

Standard skin:

[LedWidget]

Custom skin:

[Playton]

When do we need custom skins?

The Question.

I have been asked about custom skins a great number of times.
When are they really needed and how do they function?

Let's have this short article describing the topic.

First of all, we need to accept that SkinCrafter skins are skins for applications based on Windows Common Controls types.

When skin is applied, all controls are skinned with a particular graphics. I.e. all buttons look similar and all textboxes look similar.

It's not a rare case that developer needs to make some controls looking differently.

For example, he needs a greed button among the blue ones.
Or he wants to highlight the textbox with wrong input in red.
Or ...
I can list such cases endlessly.

Well, that's what the custom skins are meant for. You need them to make controls of one type look deferently than other skinned controls of this type.

Implementation.

In SkinBuilder, you should go to Custom Controls pane, and add the custom control you need.
For example, a textbox.
It will result in a new textbox item appeared in the controls tree. Which is completely the same as in Default Controls, but is here for you to put different images and colors settings.

When fulfilled, name this items according to your taste (let's say something like "redCustomTextBox" will do) and save the skin.

Now you will have two skins for textbox within a single skin file.

That's a half of the job.

If you now apply this skin to your application, all textboxes still will be skinned with default textbox skin.
That's because you need to specify in code, which control should use our custom skin .

There is an interface method - SetCustomSkinWnd - which should be used.
This method assigns a custom skin to a particular control or window.

In our case, a sample code snippet will look like this:

SkinOb.SetCustomSkinWnd(myTextBox.Handle.ToInt32(), "redCustomTextBox", false); //that's C# sample

The above code should be called after the textbox is created. And when compiled myTextBox should be skinned with custom skin and look different.

See more info about SetCustomSkinWnd method in SkinCrafter Help File.

Skins and Templates, Software and Web.

The thing which comes to my mind is that everything has a parallel.
Even in such a small niche as skin development we have skins for applications and their equivalent in web - website templates.

What do they have in common?
All skins contain graphics, colors, fonts and size settings. They differ just in technology. Ones use SkinCrafter or DirectSkin - which are quite specific tools; others do use Flash, AJAX and XML which are very widespread technologies.
So, the skins for applications are almost the same as templates for web sites.

Personally, I adore SkinCrafter for their skins gallery and TemplateMonster for their templates.

What would be really interesting to compare the actual number of developers working on skins for shareware and for websites?
I believe web is leading in this comparison.

But, nevertheless, skins are what the developers are doing. Which means that customers are demanding the nice and cute interfaces and you may improve your products if they yet had no skinning\templating support.

Well, go ahead and make your programs and websites more attractive, there are a lot of the tools to choose from.

Graformix - our best design partner!

Who is creating all the skins for SkinCrafter? Do we hire freelance designers or have on-site staff?

The correct answer is even better, we have a great partnership with Design Studio of Graformix (former A-MegaStudio and a brunch of DMSoft Technologies). They have done all skins for us and are pleasing us with new skins and GUI ideas.

Recently, they have updated their website and are expanding their portfolio on a regular basis.

So, feel free to contact them with any design requests. I'm pretty sure they offer something interesting to you.

SkinCrafter v2.8.1 release

We have released version 2.8.1 with a number of bugfixes.

SkinCrafter 2.8.1

• Tree control memory leaks corrected
• Separated checked\unchecked text color properties of push-like checkboxes and radio buttons
• Vista frame buttons bug fixed
• Dialog resizing issue corrected

You are welcome to download demo install packages from the following locations:

ActiveX and DLL: http://skincrafter.com/downloads/sc_demo.zip
.Net VS 2005: http://skincrafter.com/downloads/sc_vs2005_demo.zip
.Net VS 2003: http://skincrafter.com/downloads/sc_vs2003_demo.zip

Do not hesitate to leave your comments about this version.

Skins for User Interface - Pros and Cons

User interface, what should it be to be attractive for everyone? Classic or thematic?

Should your software offer interface designed for each and every client's needs? Let's try to find the answers to these questions.

Well, definitely, the skins are what customers of media and entertaining applications love very much.

On the other hand, there is a bunch of programs where skins are not just unnecessary but harmful.

Can you imagine the system or administrative utility painted with all the colors of the rainbow? I can not.

In this case the only affordable thing is to change the color theme. Something closer to grayish hues is my thought of such software.

But where and when the skins are demanded?

Music and video players, voice and instant messengers have number of nice and cute skins supplied with installation packages.

This is mine classification of skinned applications:

Software not eligible for skins support

Software with non-extendable skin set

Software with detailed "Skin Development Kit"

Well, first category was explained above and it's not really interesting in a scope of this article.

Programs under second clause often have own skin format and do not give it to the public.

The last category is the software I personally enjoy a lot. Customers love to make the things themselves, therefore a step-by-step tutorial of how to create the skin for your application is an attractive marketing hint.

Two ways for your application:

"Make your simple skin in 5 minutes".

Take a look back at old Winamp skins, where it was enough to use MSPaint for skins design. This is why WinAmp is the leading skinned application.

"Study our format's specifications and enjoy the great result of your efforts".

Have you ever tried to create a skin for Windows Media Player, I more then sure you have not. User interface design here is more about programming neither about graphics design.

Pros and Cons.

Now you are introduced to the general types of skinned applications and you can decide whether you go with skins or you do not need them at all.

Cons.

Skins consist of the graphics, often include animated graphics. This will increase your system resources requirements and probably slow down the performance, but...

Pros.

Most customers like to see their products customizable, change the themes according their mood, season or favorite color. Offer a skins feature you stand higher your competitors.

Skins are the fashion of software and this is your choice whether to be in or not.