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.