SkinStudio 7.3 Released

Wuuuw.... *excited*

Thank you for the update. Also thank you for the continued effort you are putting in to improve your programs.

puh in time i still can upgrade...

The skin definition fixes just mean some errors were corrected.

The high contrast fix is just a warning telling the user of a problem if they set the OS system colour for button face (not text) to pure white as this triggers office into a compatibility mode.

so, download the file, double click on the exe and let it do it's thing, does this work?

Would be nice to have a feature to port Win7 styles to WB7. I see so many I would like to use with windowblinds. 

WB will apply .themepacks if that is what you mean. Just go to Windows Aero and select one from the substyles tab. You can even apply textures to them.

Did you fix the buggy thing which gave a wrong size too rollup sized feature which is existing tll years ??

I think he meant "Visual Styles" or msstyles skins. But, could be wrong.

The way I understood that, the porting utility stopped working with OS's after XP.

Does anyone know if skinstudio 7.3 is capable of re-coloring the preview pane or library pane the section to the right in windows explorer yet ?

I know the code exists or at least the program VistaStyleBuilder has been capable of doing this for a long time.

The ability to port msstyles to WB7 would be so useful, what a shame the utility was dumped, I presume it was probably a supply and demand scenario or similar. It's tough being a skinner when there is more money in games.

okay, I just started looking at the new sks and noticed a few things that I thought I might mention.

the default skin, diamond, has been created with substyles already in place, It's pretty easy to delete those substyles that are unwanted but generally aren't substyles created after the main blind has been created to maintain margins and settings. now one would have to go a change all the settings and margins twice again.

I've only just looked at the edit start menu page there appears to be additional graphics not encountered being in place with the previous version. the 'search mode' graphic has been usually taken from the 'edit vista/7 explorer parts', not the start menu as there were some issues using this graphic. sorry, don't remember what.

also the bottom bar is now broken into a right and left graphic instead of one solid graphic. this appears to be a vista option.

the 'expanded start menu' is now a default graphic. one may not choose to use this option.

I guess I need to create a template from the diamond default blind to remove substyles and unwanted graphics before making another blind. I realize that I can just delete those graphics not wanted but I think that maybe the developers attempting to help have made the program more difficult to work with.

and it would have nice to update those "examples" to make them examples of what actually the graphic was suppose to represent. I guess a beta for feedback would have also been a consideration not employed.

Saturday bump:

so I did notice a button on the substyle menu that indicated "substyle sychronizing". I kind of wonder if this feature addresses what I mentioned above or if it has to do with something completely different. Would be nice to know what the various buttons, bells and whistles actually do and whether or not they are actually a useable tool to enhance my skinning experience or just some fluff to confuse the average user.

@ Neil is there a way to define the size of  perpixel frames with a value- iam asking this since some applications seem to have a lower value and can therefore be shrunkn to almost the rollup state with a width of 50 like skinstudio itself.
Most skins with a little bit creativity in windowframes will be cut off or the margins settings will be scaled and the whole look will change when the window gets reduced  to that 50x20 size.
So i was thinking maybe just maybee there is a way to build something into sks to define that size by a value? Or maybee WB itself like the per application setting ?
I just want to know if that is possible or not- thanks in advance btw ty for the early update on SKS

have updated,now mine just gos tits up now start panel all over the place,,thats bad,,looks like i wount be doing anymore blinds for now,,

When is the Start Menu not working right for you?

may have something to do with the bottom graphic being split in two (left and right)

Neil, I'm finding more things to mention (both good and not so good) I'll help to keep the thread alive for awhile.

Madcat, make your graphics and size them, the problem shoould go away, oh and delete the right side bottom portion unless you plan to use it.

some other things I seem to be encountering:

Edit vista/7 explorer parts - search field background There are generally two sequences of graphics (normal-pressed-disabled-mouseover) and (normal-mouseover-pressed-disabled). The sequence for this graphic is (normal-mouseover-disabled-selected) which would appear to be incorrect except that it would also appear that there is only one of the views that work anyhow. In other words; you may reduce the graphic count to 1 with no apparent impact.

Mouseover text for start menu (left and right) doesn't seem to want to change from the normal text color. In other words; changing the mouseover text color doesn't change the color.

Painting per pixel frames: "stretch middle section" option doesn't appear to work. Left and right borders seem to need "tile horz middle section" and top and bottom borders need "stretch horz middle section" to work properly.

Changing the mouseover text color only works if you do not use a mouseover image.  Silly I know, and I wish it was otherwise, but it has always been that way as far as I know.

gotta disagree with that Tom, metalworks, graphite blue and gunmetal glass are just three of my blinds that have different colored text for normal and mouseover???

For future reference

I believe Lightstar posted (in the distant past - 2009) that it still worked for XP but that for Vista and W7 you would have to make additional adjustments in SKS. The last version of SKS which used that utility was SKS5.

Here's a link to the utility. I don't believe there are any plans to update it... but I guess you could pm someone in [email protected] to ask...

https://www.stardock.com/products/skinstudio/MSImport.zip