There is nothing anywhere that even hints at how to make your own skins here. That to me would make this community grow immensely. Get some tutorials up, maybe some software to aid in development. You could even sell the software. I'd pay for it. I'm fumbling blinding with some success, but I think making my own skins for NextStart could be a lot easier with some help from the community.
If anyone knows of any tutorials or software, or just has some advise please post or email me. emyrald_night@yahoo.com
Thanks.

Errr... There are skinning tutorials, FAQs, etc... at the Winstep web site. Check out http://www.winstep.net/help.asp.

Thanks for the quick response. I could not for the life of me find that. Sorry if I sounded ranting. I'm just having a few difficulties with my first skin.

What are the major stumbling blocks you are running into?

The best/easier way to start is too look at other people's skins and see how they did it.

The theme I am trying to make will be called WinSketch and will ultimately make everything on my computer look like it was drawn to the screen in pencil on a solid white bg. Icons, Startbar, Window Frames, even fonts, all in sketched pencil style. The problems lie in that vertical lines have to be only as tall as a single button tiled up and therefore look too patterned or too straight. I want long sinuous vertical lines. Is there any way to do this?

Ah, I see what you mean. There is an option to apply a bitmap to the whole menu body (In Menu Button Skinning Preferences, check the 'To Menu' option). My guess is that that might do the trick...?

> apply a bitmap to the whole menu body ...

That's all fine and dandy Jorge but... Since buttonAS can have no transparency *inside* of buttonA, it overwrites any irregularities in buttonA. I.e. no part of buttonA can show *through* buttonAS.

Right or is there something in there that I just haven't seen?

BTW: I thought I remember reading somewhere (here) that the transparency thingy with the systray was fixed. I still get ugly (Since it shouldn't be there) color horizontal bottom strip.

Need more configuration for horizontal menu's too

Unfortunately true - currently you can work around this by simply disabling the 'use selection bar' option (thus no ButtonAS), or by using color for the selection bar instead of a bitmap.



What was fixed _undex XP_ is the transparency problem where the systray would sometimes not refresh properly.

NextSTART does not replace the systray with it's own version (this can only be properly done by replacing Explorer as a shell), it just captures the normal Windows systray and plays some tricks on it.

One of these tricks is to render the background of the systray transparent. It does this by averaging the colors used in the background portion of a bitmap 'image' of the systray and calculating a range of colors which will be turned 'transparent'. Too much and parts of the actual systray icons disappear as well - too litle, or, as in your case, if the systray background is a complex texture, pieces of the systray background still show through. Other than selecting a simpler systray background texture in Windows, not much can be done about this - Microsoft never intended the systray to be 'hacked to pieces' by external applications.



Like what?

The most annoying (IMO). Suppose > The vertical titlabar text needs a vertical offset of x pixels. The horizontal titlebar text would look best vertically centered (to line up with the rest of the 'titles'). But no, can't do that. H menu takes on V menu offset(s).

Also the V and H titlebar alignments. Would be nice if they could be different.

2 that come to mind ATM. Wishful thinking, I know.

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