I'm driving myself crazy here! I have the new Beta 9.11 of Winstep Extreme. I am skinning a workshelf. I have everything just how I want it, except the tab labels are coming out with the "outline2 effect. How do I turn this off? Presumably it is somewhere in the "skin.wsw" file, but I'm danged if I can find any option that changes this. Please put me out of my misery!

Best Regards

Andy.

Andy, as you've probably noticed by the new WorkShelf User Interface (but still the old UI in NextSTART), Winstep Xtreme is currently in a transitional phase.

The old UI (which you can still see in NextSTART) was kind of cool back in the Windows 9x days, but these days it's just plain ugly. Worse, as more and more features were added, it grew into something extremelly complex to navigate, especially for the first time user. Winstep Xtreme's generous use of context menus for the most common settings helped a lot, but when you needed something unusual you had to go to the Preferences panel: the packed UI in it looked like the cockpit of a 747.

The new UI was built with 3 things in mind: it had to have a look that was modern and attractive, it had to be simple, and it had to have the ability to support languages other than English.

At the same time, I did not want to make the same mistake Stardock did with ObjectBar 2.0, in which simplicity was achieved by actually *removing* settings and features from the UI (which made the program less powerful).

To make the interface simpler, the most obvious solution was to bury the least used settings into secondary 'Advanced' configuration dialogs, which kept the main UI simpler and with lots of 'blank' space.

The other solution was to remove nearly all of skinning settings from the applications themselves, and for a very simple reason: only 0.001% or so of all users will ever make a skin. The skinning settings, for the vast majority, were only adding to the clutter.

The idea was to move all the skinning settings into a separate application, which will be called 'Winstep Theme Builder' or something like that. This has the additional advantage that the whole Winstep Xtreme suite will be skinnable from a single, central, location, instead of forcing the skinner to jump between NextSTART and WorkShelf as it happened previously. Furthermore, since it will be a program dedicated to make Winstep themes, it will be constructed based on the feedback of the skinners themselves.

The problem is that I haven't even started working on it: I'm still busy making NextSTART's new UI, which takes priority over everything else.

In practice this means that, until this transitional phase is over, you won't be able to make new Winstep themes or change skinning related settings in Winstep Xtreme versions higher than 9.5.

There is one solution for now, though: you can still use the old 9.5 Workshelf.exe version (look in your \Winstep\Backup folder) by renaming it to Workshelf2.exe and placing it in your \Program Files\Winstep\ folder. You can then run it instead of the 9.12 version of WorkShelf whenever you wish to make a change to an existing theme.

Well, I have been creating my skin by manually editing the .wsw file, and though it is a bit fiddly, I have finally worked out what most of the keywords in that file do. The only thing I have not yet worked out is how to change the text effect on the active and inactive tabs. If you could just let me know which keyword on the .wsw file I need to tweak, I will have the skin finished.

Best Regards

Andy.

ActiveTabEffect holds the value for the text effect applied to the active tab and InactiveTabEffect holds the value for the text effect applied to the inactive tabs. 0 means no effect, 1 outline and 2 shadow.

Note that you should be very careful when editing configuration files directly, as it bypasses GUI range checks and a wrong value can potentially crash WorkShelf.

Thanks very much - that did the trick!