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.

Straightaway to 2.0

2.0. Seems this version is very close!

It will be the first major upgrade. Yep, it's great time.

It's been 3 years (whole three years) since the version 1.0 got published. You know, it's quite a long period, full of support, various bugfixes and features implementations. Yeah, it's been a good work I guess.

So, back to 2.0, what will be the updates?

• The great opportunity to store any data inside the skf files. This will allow to have any information to be in a skin, which will allow to have everything to be tuned up with the skin style. 3rd party controls, most of them available on today's market are quite customizable, now it will be possible to make their data to be skin-dependable. I think the ability to store music and video data in the skin will let to perform quite a nice functionality.
• New licence policy, we are changing  major\minor versions upgrades to a year subscription. All versions released within the year from the moment of the purchase will be given for free.
• New pricing, since 2.0 we divide SkinCrafter ActiveX and SkinCrafter.Net into separate products. Moreover our financial dept has decided to increase the price for retail versions. One licence will cost US$ 399, so be quick and purchase SkinCrafter now to apply to a free upgrade offer.

Well, that's it for now, if you guys will have more questions, please - do not hesitate and address them directly to me. I would be glad to help anyone!

 

Be skinned, be sold...

SCI 2.0 is published

It's pretty nice to see the product being released.

All features were mentioned before and might be found in the forum announcement section .

You may wonder, what are the next plans for now? Well, we are planning to release SkinCrafter v1.9.2 with bugfixes and corrections pretty soon and go further to the first major update in a three years productions.

Also, I think of putting the most frequently asked questions on the forum into a sticky FAQ post. As it turns to be so much of efforts for our customers to use search feature of the forum ;) but on the other hands it might save quite a bit of time for newcomers. Well, need to be back to the working process.

Cheers,

Be skinned, be sold...

SkinCrafter Installer

Hey!

Today we are all about the last changes and things to release new version of SkinCrafter Installer version 2.0
We plan to release in the beginning of the next week.

What's the new? Well, the first thing and most noticable is that SCI is not a freeware anymore. It will cost $39 per product licence since 2.0. Why? Well, SC is a commercial project and it should be profitable. When spending more resources and time on some software it grows with additional functionality and higher quality!



The features added are those asked by our users. Option to set an icon for the generated exe, command line mode and command line parameters support.

Well, that's it... hope to see it released soon..

Be skinned, be sold...

The very first official SkinCrafter blog's post

Dear friends,

It's been a while since we decided to start a blog for our product, but only now it comes to the reality.

That's the first post here, isn't that great?

I assume we will be blogging the info about our future plans, current problems and fresh solutions for everyone who wants to get his application skinned.

Skins are becoming an integral part of every software on the market, and it doesn't matter whether it's freeware or shareware. End users got accustomed to the nice look of the programs they are working with. That's what our team is here for. Our designers and programmers are the pros in skinning industry, we've studied tons of skins under most of Operation Systems, we know the features which are required and we're trying to offer a professional but yet not-so-hard-to-use solution for the development teams.

This blog will help those coders who is looking for the skinning technique tips. Also, I believe this blog might be used as a rapid information spreading place. If we'll have some news which are not so important or informative to release a newsletter, they'll be placed here.

We run SkinCrafter forum for all technical and other questions discussions, so everyone's welcome to join and get they questions answered shortly.

The MAIN news for now is SkinCrafter.NET 2.0 release, which we expect to be published quite soon. We've met a number of innovations which required us to change the code of even offer the workarounds to the customers. We've add support to new strip-like controls. So, for now that's only left to wait for the release and see your comments on it.

That's it for now.

Be skinned, be sold....